Re: transcription questions

----- Original Message -----
From: "lblissett" <blissett@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2002 8:02 PM
Subject: Re: transcription questions

>        When people write out the phonologies for their lang, do they
assign
> and use new characters for sounds like this? This is my first attempt at
> trying to negotiate my language with IPA/X-SAMPA.
I don't know what other people do, but here's what I do:

For each phoneme in any language I'm working on, I determine what the IPA
representation is, and if there are various allophones, I describe those in
IPA as well.  If the character that best suits it is the one for M\ with the
_0 and _h diacritics followed by k, then that's what I write.  (Though, that
doesn't look nearly as bad when in IPA as opposed to the X-SAMPA
representation of it.)

After I've got some IPA written down, I work up a standard orthography.  If
the sound you choose to represent with h can never be followed by the sound
you represent with k, then hk might be a good way to write it.  Or perhaps
hc.  Or @.  Whatever you want.  I always make up a phonemic or phonetic
transcription of a language in Roman-type characters.  For example, I have a
language with an alveolar click.  It represents it with x.

Using whatever orthography I've got, the pronunciation of a word flows
naturally from the spelling, without any problems.  Now, that often isn't
the way that language's *speakers* would write it.  Their writing system
might have some ambiguity that makes two written words look the same.  Or it
might not record vowels.  Or it might be logographic, giving practically no
clues as to the pronunciation.

That's sort of the procedure I'd look at.  So in the end, you'd have a page
full of phonological data like:

a   a, æ when stressed
d   d, ð in between vowels
e   e
h   h, x after back vowels
hk  hx_k
l   ||éhj
x   !

And so on, showing your transcription on the left, the IPA on the right, no
matter how complicated.  Anyway, hope that's the sort of thing you're
looking for.

Joe Fatula