Re: CONLANG Digest

> From:    Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...>
> Subject: Script evolution
>
> The second part is, did any of you "evolve" your scripts? Meaning, if you
> derived it from another script, did you write out the  glyphs several
> times to get a descendant script? And, if you made your own from scratch,
> dod you make a "proto-script", and then evolve the letter forms from that?
> Or did you guys just keep writing out characters until you found a look
> you liked?
>
My computer's crashed three times on me while trying to write this message
so I'll make it short this time.
The answers roughly are "yes, yes, and yes"; the images are:
http://www.southern.edu/~alrivera/hadwanish.gif
http://www.southern.edu/~alrivera/medacolor.gif
http://www.southern.edu/~alrivera/dai-iambs.gif
and
http://www.southern.edu/~alrivera/daimyo.gif
...and the explanations will be given, if demand merits it, whenever my
computer isn't feeling so cranky (or when I'm at a different one)

> From:    Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> Subject: Re: CONLANG Digest
>
> Muke Tever wrote:
> > Only if you're trying to spell *phoneTically*.  If you spell
*phoneMically*
> > you can have wider currency of the language (where, say, American
"house" and
> > Canadian "house" would still be spelled the same way).
>
> Still, there'd be major differences.  Some pronounce <wh> and <w>
> differently.
I do (usually, I think), but I'm not aware of a minimal pair between them.

> > But most likely if this happens there'll be
> > nationally adopted "standard" dialects...
>
> Nevertheless, there'd still be distinctions between, for instance,
> American English and British English.  Of course, some might say that
> that's a good thing.  :-)  *Thinking of Noah Webster's ghost cheering
> over the fulfillment of his wish* :-)
There's _already_ differences between American English and British English.
;p

> > Of course, English will never do spelling reform.
>
> Not a major spelling reform, but minor ones, like "tho" and "thru", or
> "lite" and "nite" are already becoming popular.  I don't forsee English
> spelling ever becoming completely phonemic, but I do see it becoming
> less convoluted.
I think "tho" is just lazy writing/typing on most people's part.
Thru-lite-nite I'm only aware of as trademark-dodging or other
brandnameness.  (trademarkdodging, where a basic word description can't be
trademarked, though a mutant form can:  hypothetically "Light bulbs" no
trademark, but "Lite-Bulb™")

> From:    "Daniel A. Wier" <DaWier@...>
> Subject: Re: CHAT: Reformed Latin-script writing for natlangs
>
> I checked out the Code2000 font myself.  I wasn't that impressed, and
> for several reasons:
> 1) OpenType Properties told me that the font cannot be embedded due to
> license restrictions,
The license (the .htm file that comes with it) says it's shareware and that
an embeddable version might be received on payment.  [IIRC...]

> 4) Unicode is not widely used outside of Europe, the Americas, the Far
> East (CJK-using countries) and Australia.  It is used to a limited
> degree in Israel for Hebrew, the Arabic countries, Iran (for Farsi),
> Thailand and Viêt Nam.  But as far as I know, Unicode is irrelevant in
> India, for instance.  India for the most part uses 8-bit fonts according
> to their own 8-bit conventions, or they just speak English (the de facto
> lingua franca in India for interstate use, even though the government is
> working to replace English with Hindi).  Same goes for Georgia or
> Armenia, or Laos or
What's this have to do with the particular font, BTW?

> 5) The appearance of the Armenian, Georgian, Devanagari and other
> characters were unimpressive.  The 8-bit fonts that can be downloaded
> from Yamada or Dr. Berlin's site for the most part looks much better.
Well, given that most particularly language-specific fonts are more likely
to be made by a native reader of the language than a pan-linguistic one,
that might be expected.  He's tried but some specific shapes could still use
some help (I'm not very happy with his combining ogonek...)

> 6) Where's Bengali?  Last time I checked, Bengali is spoken by as many
> people as Hindi-Urdu.  And Assamese misses out too.  Not every font is
> represented in this; there are clear gaps.  (I have to give them credit
> for including the Syriac font though.  But it only includes Estrangelo,
> not the modern "Nestorian" script used by Assyrians today.)
There are quite a few alphabets in the Private Use area, though:  I
recognized the klingon, the tolkienscripts, and that one they always use in
pictures of the proto-latino-graeco-etc alphabet (phoenician?)

> I give a grade of C for this font, and mostly because the designer
> worked pretty hard on this; they did include CJK characters after all.
> But what can be accomplished with this one font, can be easily done with
> several 8-bit fonts and one's own preferred encoding conventions.
Several fonts are a terrible hassle to deal with.  One Unicode font is much
more convenient, especially if you have an unorthodox alphabet that requires
weird characters from everywhere.  This is only the second Unicode font with
serifs I've seen though, which is a good thing (not the paucity of serif
fonts, but the existence of this one).  I'd be using Thryomanes's font,
except it hasn't got the U+21D1 arrow I need (but then it doesn't have
arrows at all, I think).  Arial Uni and Lucida Sans Uni haven't got Unicode
3's latin letter 'ou' (looks like an 8 open at the top), and UniPad's
inability to define keyboards doesn't help much either.

As for "encoding conventions", I think MS Word is laughing at me.  [It told
me I had to "convert my encoding to UTF+8" before I could save as HTML.  Of
course it doesn't say _how_, and UTF+8 appears _nowhere_ in the
helpfiles...]

...hmmm.  Anyway, I like this font.

> From:    DOUGLAS KOLLER <LAOKOU@...>
> Subject: Re: Hello?  and a question
>
> From: "Carlos Eugenio Thompson (EDC)"
>
> > Newer words... I guess we cannot understimate the influence of
> orthographic
> > borrowings.  Smorgasbord is an orthografic borrowing from Swedish
> > _smörgåsbord_.  Pronunciation reflects the way an Englishspoken person
> would
> > mangle _smorgasbord_, instead as mimicing the way Swedes pronounce it
> > (translated into English phonology, somthing like /"sm@:g@sbu:d/)
>
> For the English concept of the Swedish word, I say /'smo:rg@s'bo:rd/.
I think I've heard /'Smo:rg@sbo:rd/ more often, actually (with /S/ ?)


    *Muke!


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