Re: New Hadwoid lang

From: "dirk elzinga" <dirk.elzinga@...>
>On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, Muke Tever wrote:
>> Well, actually it drops phonemic length.  Stressed vowels in open
syllables
>> are longer.  And since I don't know how stress works yet, I have to mark
the
>> stress.  Not so easy, because stressed vs unstressed looks like this:
>>
>>    Unstr [ @  A O E e   i o u 9 Y]
>>    Str   [A E  O   I  e i U u Y y]
>
>I'm not sure I understand this here; do you mean that stressed
>[A, E] neutralize to unstressed [@], and that stressed [O] and
>[I] each have two unstressed counterparts?
Well, that diagram isn't exactly the best way to describe what happened.
(It's a mix of what vowels I was thinking of writing with and what vowels I
knew what came from.)

Basically, this happened:

- Already in Hadwan we had [A: E: I: U: Y:] going to [Q: e: i: u: y:].

Then:
- [Q] > [O]
- [e:] > [i:] **

then,

-Stressed   [O: e: i: u: y:]
became      [O  i  i  u  y]

-Unstressed [A E I U Y O: e: i: u: y:]
became      [@ @ E o 9 O  e  i  u  y]

The other original vowels not changing.

[I *think*.]   So an original <a> /A(:)/ became any of [A @ O] depending on
original length and stress.
(Also, <e> to [E i @ e]; <i> [I i E]; <o> [U u o]; <y> [Y y 9].)

Basically it's just two changes: quantity becoming quality, and
unstressed-weakening.

(Some of those [@] will disappear, too.  I haven't decided under what
circumstances though.)

** [e:] should actually not under normal circumstances appear as a phoneme
in native words.  What's more, the sound spelled by this letter might have
always been [i:] and never pronounced as [e:] at all (in which case I should
throw out the e: > e rule).  I'll have to look into it.

>I understand that the romanization of a conlang is fraught with
>many aesthetic considerations, but it is just a representation
>of a deeper, more precious truth. If I had my druthers, I'd
>eliminate all diacritics in favor of bi- and trigraphs. But
>again, it's an aesthetic preference. I just recently read a
>paper on the orthography of the Ormulum; now there was a guy who
>understood how to write English! It's led me to rethink some of
>my own conlang orthographic habits.
Actually, for some reason digraphs never entered my mind for this.  (I am a
victim of the "One phoneme, one grapheme" poltergeist.)  That may be an idea
to work on, while this lang's still in draft.

>(I'd actually be happy with adding some letters to the basic
>set; things like thorn, eth, wynn, and some Cyrillic characters
>that seem to be really useful as well.)
I wanted to spell [G] with yogh.  Mm.

>> Anyway,..
>>
>> Having a go at a sentence:
>>
>>     Arkó îg hódzhèghvêgh zhûvxechor romalhûg a zhemûg.
>>    [@r"kO: Ig "hO:dZeGveG "ZUvksEtS_hor rom@"5Ug @ ZE"mUg]
>
>Gack. That's quite a bristly look ... but I like the sound of
>it.
Gack indeed.  I must streamline yon representation. ;)

>> The grammar is not entirely certain yet, but the changes I know of so far
>> are implemented.  Also, imagine all those clumsy h's are the graceful
>> diacritical marks they're supposed to be: carons, a bar on the l, and
breves
>> on the gs.
>
>You mean there are even more diacritics? Huh. I suppose it would
>have its own peculiar charm (somewhat like Vietnamese ...).
Well, I tend to diacritics faster because they take up less space.  But it
does seem as though something's a bit wrong when nearly every letter in a
word carries one.  HMMrgh.  Rousy Ratin Arphabet.

>>  Eh.  I haven't checked against the native alphabet but I think
>> they had a better starting set of letters to begin with, so it may be
less
>> of a problem for them.
>
>Let's hope so. Of course, there is the possibility of having a
>minimal orthography which doesn't mark all phonological
>distinctions ... I designed this kind of orthography once upon a
>time for Tepa. It encoded place of articulation for stops (but
>not voicing, that being an allophonic variation), had a single
>symbol for the nasals, and didn't distinquish vowels from glides
>(much less vowel length). Then I realized that the culture
>probably couldn't support writing, so I scrapped it.
Heh.  I could actually do that.   This descendent lang, conculturally, is
supposed to be a minority language and probably won't have too much literary
value.

Come to think of it, the orthography for this lang should probably be based
on that of the majority lang (whenever I get around to making it).

>> This was the language I asked about stress changes for.. I'm still not
sure
>> what I'm going to do about it.
>
>I just replied on the stress stuff; I think it looks good.
Thanks.


    *Muke!

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