Re: Con-Alphabets & Real Languages

From: "jogloran"

> 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 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?
Cultural proximity? Latin imported k, x, y, and z from Greek, no? I'm not a
Latinist, but "x" seemed to catch on, while k, y, and z, were used mostly
for Greek imports. The Romance languages have scant need for "k" or "w", but
they pop up in loans. Chinese dialects other than Mandarin which claim to
have no native script often coin new characters by placing the mouth
(sometimes person) radical next to homophonous (or nearly homophonous)
charcters to fit dialect need (Mandarin speakers would vegge): eg: Cantonese
"gui6", "gigantic"; add the person radical and we get "kui5", "he, she it";
Shanghaines "nong2" plus person rad becomes "nong2", "you, singular".

And with that, a dash of exoticism. English could have fully
adopted/embraced the word "chic" as "sheek" or "sheak" (how often is "ch"
/S/ in English, save French loans?), but it loses something, don't you think
(and English takes in loanwords easily)? Japanese (also a loanword fiend)
has adopted non-standard Japanese usages of katakana to accomodate the
non-native sounds of "f" and "v" (katakana "hu" with a subscript "i"
(normally not possible) renders "fish" as "huishyu"; similarly "bu" plus
subscript "i" gets you a "v". Why, the contortions? 'Cause it's foreign.

I guess, point of above paragraph: loanwords and cultural ebb and flow.

Too, there are language learning pronunciation guides. Japanese books on
tourist English often use katakana to approximate English pronunciation for
those who don't want to spend umpteen hours on English study for their two
weeks in the US. So you get sentences in katakana like "Idzu disu aa reddo
bukku" for "Is this a red book?" I have a (Modern) Greek-English
conversation book, which gives us (in Greek letters): "ít íz béri gkoud fWr
dH hélth" for "It is very good for the health."

So my answer as to why a script would adapt it's script to other systems is:
cultural or concultural. Since most conlangers speak (a) natlang(s), I don't
think it would be unheard of for some of them to want to cop a few
loanwords, due to the cultural proximity (real or imagined). Géarthnuns has
a fairly hefty phonetic inventory, so it usually doesn't have to stray to
far afield when it decides to adopt a loanword (other than some occasional
weird consonant clusters, which, while they don't pose serious pronunciation
problems, sometimes involve tweeking syllable breakdown)(and Géarthnuns is
fairly conservative when it comes to loanwords), but YAHWEH (for Bible
translation) required orthographic backflips. Didn't need to create new
letters, but seriously bent orthographic rules (basically "ignore and
pronounce this way....). But if you lang has a more limited phonetic stash
or stricter rules governing the combinations thereof, sometime you'll have
to fudge.

Of course, just doing it for the heck of it is also an option.

Kou

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