Re: How to mark Tech ejectives and syllabics using Arabic script

From: "David Peterson" <DigitalScream@...>

> In a message dated 01/19/02 12:26:42 PM, dawier@YAHOO.COM writes:
>
> << So I welcome comments as to whether this is in character and tradition
with
>
> Arabic script. >>
>
>     Since no one else said anything, I thought I might as well.  Your idea
is
> rather inventive.  :)  What's more, it kind of makes sense: the glottal
stop
> symbol being associated with ejectives, and the maddah whose effect is to
> lengthen the /a/ vowel (I don't know if that was its initial purpose) is
used
> to syllabify nasals and liquids.  Excellent.  Bravo! ~:D  I don't think I
> would have ever thought of that.
The idea came from the need to make do with a limited set of glyphs provided
by most fonts (Tahoma and Arial Unicode do offer all the extended characters
found in Urdu, Sindhi, Uyghur, old Malay, Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish and
dialectal Arabic). I also know of only one natlang that's ever been written
in Arabic script that has ejectives: Hausa, and maybe some North Caucasian
languages; I don't remember the conventions for those. But the hamzeh thing
was there, and it's used with other consonants (over hah in Pashto for /dz/
and over alif, waw and yeh in Kazakh for certain vowel sounds).

Incidentally, Tech has both ejective and "emphatic" consonants, depending on
whether the word comes straight from Proto-Semitic or Proto-Indo-European or
a contemporary Semitic language like Hebrew, Arabic or Syriac where
"emphatic" means pharyngealized/backed.

The maddeh for syllabics... well that's more arbitrary. I thought of alef
maddeh as being a double alef: the first to indicate a glottal stop or
initial vowel, and the second for the long a. This would only be used for
initial syllabic consonants (especially those frequent initial syllabic
nasals).

~Danny~


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