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Re: Con-Alphabets & Real Languages

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Sunday, December 30, 2001, 5:27
Kou wrote:


>> Christian Thalmann wrote: > >> > Inspired by the different modes of Tengwar, I added a few more >> > characters to my original con-alphabet for Obrenje to allow more for >> > more language modes. It seems to work nicely with English, German >> and >> > Latin so far.
It's presumptuous of me to carp and cavil about the German version, but-- (1) why adapt "dh" for Germ./z/, when there is a perfectly good "z" in your script? Surely Germ. /Z/ is so rare/foreign that it ought to get the unusual symbol? (2) why is "so" /zo/ written {dho} but "aussieht" is written with {-ss-}? Isn't it [aws.'zi:t]? I could be wrong, Lord knows..........Actually, aside from the vowels, you could almost follow German spelling conventions, although then your con-people might not know how to pronounce it. Imperative wrote:
> >> It's quite nice and all, but realistically, other than for the >> enjoyment of the creator, is there any reason to adapt one's script >> to other (natural) languages?
Kou pretty much pre-empted everything I was going to say.......Slavs, Goths, Etruscans, Romans all adapted the Greek alphabet, which was an adaptation of the Phoenician. All S/SE Asian scripts are adaptations of one or another Indic script, themselves adapted from {Aramaic??} My Kash dialect doesn't use {b d g N & O @} etc. though the characters exist and are used in related languages. Good publishers invest in the whole font, cheapies don't. So the Gwr nation Bau Da [baw dA] often gets written "pawu ta", which seems close enough for most readers..... If the day ever comes when Kash newspapers routinely report Terran events, they will have to figure out how to write "Washington" -- wa.çiñ.t(a/o)n ?-- et al. The sole Kash speaker on Earth at the moment has decided to adapt Spanish words for concepts lacking in his language, so /pero/ 'dog', /keso/ 'cheese', /tiyos/ 'God' etc. etc. but even Spanish phonology sometimes runs afoul of Kash rules.

Replies

laokou <laokou@...>
Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>