Re: Caucasian phonologies and orthographies

From: "John Quijada" <jq_ithkuil@...>

> It's fascinating to see how illogical the Cyrillic situation is for the
> Northeastern Caucasian languages.  Abkhaz and Abaza are closely related
> (some linguists consider them mere dialects of one language), so you'd
> think the authorities who provided alphabets for them would use consistent
> transcription systems, yet the two systems are miles apart, with Abkhaz
> using 14 newly contrived letters ("neographs"?)not found in any other
> Cyrillic-transcribed language, while all the other Caucasian languages get
> by using standard Cyrillic plus the new letter I.  Does anyone know the
> history of how Abkhaz's writing system came to be so aberrant compared to
> the other written Caucasian languages?
Personally I like Abkhazian Cyrillic for what it's worth, neoglyphs and all.
Digraphs are only used if a feature like labiovelarization occurs, and the
use of the palochka I no longer necessary to mark ejectives. Except it's an
alphabetizing nightmare, and the only font I know of that includes those
letters is Arial Unicode MS, that 22+ MB monster.

A comment I forgot to include in my last post: that thing in Abkhaz which
looks like a couple loops, is in X-SAMPA /H/, but originally it was a
labialized voiced pharyngeal fricative (think Arabic <ayn> + <w>).

> Also:  for those interested in the more-or-less accepted transcription
> system used (by linguists only) for Ubykh, see the following link:
> http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/ubykh.pdf
The Wikipedia entry on Ubykh should interest you too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_language

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