Re: Con-Alphabets & Real Languages

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.

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