Re: Virama

>
>
>Hmmm... on second thought, you might want to keep the mark for /e/
>when marking /o/ since /au/ is prototypically marked by using the
>mark for /e/ twice and the mark for /a:/ once. I apologize for being
>extremely vague when I just said that /au/ was a variant of /o/.
>I think the reason why Buginese can suffice without the mark for
>/e/ to represent /o/ is because it does not represent diphthongs.
>So it would not need to represent /e/ twice to represent /au/.
>But perhaps you can come up with some other reason why the
>prototypical mark for /e/ would disappear when marking /o/ and /au/
>in Ranaka.
Hmm I think i'll use e and a fossilized diacritic for aa. The lay out is
subscript e and fossilized aa to the right. Although it seems that the
scripts that dont circumfix the two diacritics put the mark for e at the
top. I also noticed for /au/ there is a lengthener mark (as the Unicode
charts called it) used with the e diacritic. Perhaps I can add a
fossilized lengthener mark to represent /au/ (which would now have no
purpose other than for making a dependent /au/ sound).
>
>
>
>
>But keep them historically motivated if you want to be realistic.
>Perhaps the consonants with a virama got reinterpreted as diacritics.
>So /ei/ for instance could be represented by the diacritic for /e/
>combined with another diacritic that developed from /j/ + virama
>ligature.
>
Here's what I thought up: Originally, to represent dependent /ej/ /oj/
/iw/ sounds, they used y with virama, and w with virama. Over time, the
shapes of the two glyphs plus their viramas were connected, and mutated to
the form they are today (a kind of squiggle type mark).

A gif of the new version of the diacritic system is here:
http://student.monterey.edu/dh/garciabarryjames/world/SaaDiacr.gif

It's basically what I understand from the posts on this topic.


________________________________________________

It's worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance...