Re: digraphs (was: Rhotics)

Hallo!

On Sat, 7 Jul 2007 12:49:36 +0100, Jeff Rollin wrote:

> In the last episode, (On Saturday 07 July 2007 12:43:10), R A Brown wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > Quite so, I might _grudgingly_ use them in such circumstances. But I am
> > not over-fond of digraphs. Indeed, there are possibly some on this list
> > who may recall that a few years back, when on that other list there was
> > a proposal to reform the auxlang Novial, I made the modest suggestion
> > that its two digraphs, _ch_ and _sh_, should scrapped.
Yes, an auxlang ought to have only one sibilant - /s/, written |s|.
When designing an auxlang, having to resort to digraphs, diacritics
or special letters is a sure sign that you are using too many phonemes.
This issue is one of the auxlang design issues I discuss in
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/auxlang-design.html .

> [...] 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.

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.)

>       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?

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