Re: Gzarondan: Spelling Review

You may want to do what I did.  I devised my Senyecan orthography
before joining the conlang group.  I, too, do not like digraphs (I
have no idea why not), & prefer diacritics.  When I joined the
conlang group & discovered the limitations here, I modified the
orthography for use here & substituted some digraphs.  You can keep
your original orthography for other places where it can be used, &
use the modified one here.

You might also like to experiment with some consonants & see which
ones you CAN use here.  I have discovered that I can us ß, ç, &
¢.  I
know that last is not, strictly speaking, a letter, but it looks like
it would be a nice symbol for a palatal or velar or uvular fricative.

I have yet to find a natural alphabet that has enough letters to give
a one-to-one correspondence of grapheme to phoneme without having to
do some "diacriticking" or changing the standard phonemic value.
You'd think Cyrillic would have enough!!

Charlie

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating
Dragon)" <dragon@N...> wrote:
Having posted my draft review of Gzarondan phonology over nine hours
ago and a couple of modifications over three hours ago, I'm now going
to post a draft review of Romanised Gzarondan spelling.

It's possible that this is premature, because if the phonology turns
out to need changes (in order to look reasonably naturalistic) then
this may affect the spelling (which it certainly will do in the event
of changes to the phoneme set itself). However, that's an eventuality
I'll just have to deal with if it arises.

Note that this spelling reform involves some radical changes, being
essentially re-created from scratch. For consonants, I have decided to
avoid digraphs where possible this time around, and to this end have
sometimes chosen to fit a consonant into a somewhat unconventional
role (e.g. 'v' for /D/ and 'h' for /T/). I believe I have done the
right thing, but of course comments are welcome.

My most unusual choice has to be my only consonant digraph, which is
'yl' for /K/ (i.e. the phonome that Welsh is most famous for). It may
take some getting used to that /EkK@/ would be _ekyla_ and /Ka:g/
would be _ylaag_ (to invent examples on the spot) but I've convinced
myself that this is better than any of the alternatives.

The point is this: using the basic English-language alphabet there's
no way I can avoid at least one consonant being a digraph. As
mentioned in my phological review, there are certain consonants that
cannot appear at the end of a syllable, namely /D/ /z/ /r/ /j/ /x_w/
and /K/. Therefore the logical choice for a digraph is one in which
the first letter usually represents one of the above phonemes. I've
looked at all the options that this opens and concluded that 'yl' for
/K/ is the best choice I have ('y' normally represents /j/).

Anyway, here's the draft, open for comments.

Adrian.

**********************************************************************
****************************   Spelling   ****************************
**********************************************************************

+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+
| Spelling | Phoneme | Spelling | Phoneme | Spelling | Phoneme |
+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+
| i        | /I/     | ii       | /i:/    | il       | /Il/    |
| e        | /E/     | ei       | /e:/    | el       | /El/    |
| u        | /@/     | uj       | /8:/    | ujl      | /8l/    |
| a        | /a/     | aa       | /a:/    | al       | /al/    |
| w        | /U/     | ow       | /o:/    | wl       | /l=/    |
| o        | /O/     | oo       | /O:/    | ol       | /Ol/    |
+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+

  * Use 'i' in place of 'ii' at the end of a word.
  * Use 'a' in place of 'u' at the end of a word.

+----------+---------+
| Spelling | Phoneme |
+----------+---------+
| ai       | /aI/    |
| aw       | /aU/    |
| ij       | /I8/    |
| ej       | /E8/    |
+----------+---------+

+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+
| Spelling | Phoneme | Spelling | Phoneme | Spelling | Phoneme |
+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+
| v        | /D/     | h        | /T/     | f        | /f/     |
| z        | /z/     | s        | /s/     | x        | /S/     |
|          |         | c        | /x/     | q        | /x_w/   |
+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+

+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+
| Spelling | Phoneme | Spelling | Phoneme | Spelling | Phoneme |
+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+
| m        | /m/     | b        | /b/     | p        | /p/     |
| n        | /n/     | d        | /d/     | t        | /t/     |
|          |         | g        | /g/     | k        | /k/     |
+----------+---------+----------+---------+----------+---------+

+----------+---------+
| Spelling | Phoneme |
+----------+---------+
| r        | /r/     |
| y        | /j/     |
| l        | /l/     |
| yl       | /K/     |
+----------+---------+
--- End forwarded message ---

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