Re: digraphs (was: Rhotics)

In the last episode, (On Saturday 07 July 2007 13:36:42), Jörg Rhiemeier
wrote:

>
> > [...] You're also right that "if a conlang
> > has a system of lenition similar to Gaelic", it makes sense to use
> > digraphs to represent /v/ and /f/.
>
> Actually, the digraphs are only a jury-rig.  In the actual Irish uncial
> script, no h-digraphs are used.  Instead, they use dots above the letters,
> which is far more elegant.
Quite right, but since I would guess most people who have seen modern Celtic
languages have seen them written with digraphs instead of dots, again, if you
want to make your lang /look/ Welsh, Irish, etc., digraphs are surely the way
to go?

>
> As for my own conlangs, I currently use h-digraphs to transcribe spirants
> in the Albic languages.  I should perhaps ditch them in favour of dots
> above the letters or some other sort of diacritics, but the digraphs are
> easier to type.  (The Old Albic script, of course, does not use digraphs.)
That would be cool. BTW, any decent word processor or text editor should be
able to replace all instances of <digraph> with <some other symbol or
sequence>; there's a text editor called mined which works with Unicode, but
it's unwieldly IMO. In a word processor all you would have to do is to choose
some digraph that isn't used in the language you're using to describe the
conlang (to avoid any extraneous conversions)  or the conlang itself (as a
sequence of phonemes, I mean). E.g. if you're writing in English, and your
conlang doesn't have /sx/ as a phoneme sequence, then you could replace all
instances of "sx" with "ś" (which should come out as s-acute), for example.

The other way to do it would be to enable dead letters - I don't know if you
can do this in Windows, Mac or GNOME but in KDE, once dead letters are
enabled, to get for example a-acute you type <apostrophe>,<a>. (If you need
to type an apostrophe, type apostrophe,<space>.)

>
> >       OTOH, IMAO that's looking at it more from a "I want
> > it to look like Gaelic" standpoint than a strictly linguistic one -
> > there's no reason, for example, why you couldn't have a language that
> > /sounded/ like Irish (or Gaelic), but /looked/ (as far as possible) like
> > Welsh, English, Finnish, or even Russian if you're prepared to make you
> > readers learn the Cyrillic alphabet!
>
> Why not?
Indeed. Though it will reduce your audience! This is probably an example of
ASTADEW (A Serious Text Already Does Even Worse) - I've never seen Russian
quoted in the Cyrillic alphabet in an English text without a transliteration,
but I have seen Latin and Greek quoted without a word of explanation - I can
get away with "Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est"-type Latin, but
anything more complicated and the writer could be saying "Your mother was a
German slavewhore!". And Greek is, well, Greek to me. :-/

Jeff
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