Re: Help with IPA, Gothic

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Daniel D Hicken wrote:

> I'm working on a conlang that's essentially a daughter of Gothic;  but
> I'm at a loss for the correct IPA for the Germanic (I'm assuming)
> alveolar and uvular fricatives, the r, as well as the spanish trilled r.
Mark's covered these.

> I also am at a loss to read the form of romanized gothic I have at my
> disposal.  Some figures, such as the thorn, I assume to be the /T/ but
> there are several others like the British pound sign that I have no clue
> how to read.   Can any of y'all be of service?
You're right about /T/. There's diagraphs <ei> /i:/, <gV> /N<V>/ V=velar,
<ai>, <au>, where there might be an accent on the first or second element
of the <ai> and <au>. By the later periods, I understand these were always
prounced as /E/, /O/, though their readings varied (I can't remember which
was which, but at one stage or another I think one represented diphthongs,
one long /E:/, /O:/, and one /E/, /O/). e and o are always long, I think.

Then you might also find a letter that looks something like a <hv>
ligature, or it might simply be transcribed as <hv>. This funny chap (by
far my fav'ritest but I've never found an excuse to use it) is named hwair
and pronounced /W/ (an unvoiced [w]). I find it interesting that the
romanisation of another script would include a letter not used in the
alphabets of any natively roman language. I mean, if it was me, I'd
probably just but an accent on a <w> if I didn't do <hv>.

I have no idea whether a hwair looks like a pound sign to you or not, but
it might. I guess it sorta looks like a Japanese N, and a Japanese N sorta
looks like a pound sign. If it's not this, then I'm not sure what you
mean.

Of course, these pronunciations are reconstructions only and might not
have been accurate, so /W/ might actually simply be [h_w] or something.

--
Tristan

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