Re: Romaji as syllabary

On Sunday, February 27, 2005, at 06:24 , Jeffrey Jones wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 07:30:48 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> wrote:
[snip]
>> If you have read the latest published version on my website, it looks as
>> tho I have at last decided on a definite solution. but i am currently
>> working on the morphology, and I am realizing there are some weakness in
>> the scheme I suggested for Bax (I've also noticed some typos :)
>
> What weaknesses specifically? I took a quick look a couple days ago. None
> of the typos I saw seemed critical.
Good - none of the ones I've noticed so far are critical either.

> I'm not sure I like the phonetic rules
> for Bax, though the scheme looks OK otherwise.
Which rules? It may coincide with some of the things niggling me.

I have BTW now dropped the terms 'short' and 'long' when describing the
vowels. As someone pointed out many languages do not make a phonemic
distinction between the two. Nor, actually, does Bax! I confess I was
somewhat unthinkingly following Babm descriptions.

In the revision - not yet published on the Web - I now talk of stressed &
unstressed vowels.

Two things bother me:

1. I am not eniterely happy at the present system where lexical morphemes
will begin with a consonant + unstressed vowel + stressed vowel. I know
Fuishiki Okamoto was quite happy with short vowels followed immediately by
long vowels in Babm, but the similar feature in Bax troubles me a little.
If the unstressed vowel is either /i/ or /u/ then [j] or [w] could be used
instead. But what does one do with unstressed /a/ before a stressed vowel?

2. At present for the most part we have the _written_ forms CVC for
lexical morphemes & C for particles. It means that VC may occur, if at all,
  only at the beginning of a clause and CV only at the end of one. As there
are 133 possible CV and another 133 possible VC combos, this does not seem
to be making the best use of them. It occurs to me that in a _briefscript_
one ought to make better use of them.

> I had to guess at some of
> the characters. My browser does handle Unicode and most IPA, if told to do
> so, but what it _doesn't_ handle is hex values.
Darn browsers! I test my pages with Mozilla and Opera - and they work OK.
I've given up trying with Internet Explorer, as my version, at least,
seems hopeless. But some info please. How do I tell your browser to handle
Unicode? How do I include IPA symbols the in the html coding? I've tried
decimal & IE doesn't like that either.

I guess the only sure way is to create pdf documents - and I don't have
the software to do that.

[snip]
> Having to use the shift key _does_ slow things down. That's OK for an
> artlang such as 'Yemls, but not for a briefscript.
I agree.

> The only problem I see
> with using digits is that on some non-English keyboards, shift is required
> (according to a handy MS-DOS reference). The location of other characters
> varies even more. All this could be fixed with software, but (a) the
> software might not be installed on a given computer, and (b) the user
> would
> have to learn to touchtype according to the briefscript keyboard layout to
> avoid getting confused.
Yep - I guess that is all very true. I guess I'd better forget about the
digits - except as numersls, of course :)

>  That's probably why I haven't made a serious
> attempt to make my own briefscript.
Wise man  ;)

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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