Re: Alphabet

On Thursday, November 1, 2001, at 08:03 , Nik Taylor wrote:

> John Laury wrote:
>> I've realized
>> that (at least to my own knowledge) no writing systems
>> in existence actually do that.
>
> Japanese does!  Well, not the nasal part, but Japanese kana has a
> diacritic that indicates voicing.  Thus, "ka" plus that diacritic makes
> "ga".  The "h" series becomes "b" with the voicing mark, but that's
> because in Old Japanese, what is now "h" was /p/.  They've since
> invented another diacritic, traditionally called the "half-voiced mark"
> to show "p" from "h".
>
I heard it called the "plosive" mark in James Heisiger's book on learning
hiragana.  :-p  I like this feature of Japanese a lot, though I haven't
had an opportunity to steal it for a conscript yet.

> Korean hangul is also based on phonetic principles, but I don't know
> much of the details.  Yoon Ha would probably know more.
>
<wry g>  I'll elaborate in response to David's post.  :-)

I think I'm probably overly biased with the fact that Korean's the only
non-Roman alphabet system I'm really comfortable with (I only know some of
the hiragana, a few of the katakana, and random Greek letters from physics/
math).  Thus far my two conscripts have *both* been based somewhat on
Korean, and look quite related to each other (which fact doesn't bother me)
  if you allow for the different phonologies, the fact that Czevraqis is
written vertically and Tasratal horizontally, and letter-arrangements.

>> I see a lot of people discussing ways to write their
>> languages using Roman letters.  Do most people here
>> tend to create new alphabets or do they stick to
>> established writing systems?
>
> I use romanization.  I have a syllabry, but it's not used much.
I create conscripts but use romanization for my own convenience.  I do
like to write out vocabulary in the conscript for my own practice, though,
  and I can actually "read" and write Czevraqis pretty decently now.
Tasratal will take time, but then, I just invented the script two days ago
during Adolescent Development.  <squirm>  Perhaps this weekend I can get
it up on the web for the perusal of the curious.

I am amazed by those who devise syllabaries and logographic conscripts.  I
can't come up with that many shapes without looking at existing scripts.
:-)

Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

THAC0 is NOT a Mexican food.

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