Re: Thagojian 3B notes

On Sat, 02 Dec 2006 12:45:17 -0500, Philip Newton
<philip.newton@...> wrote:

> On 12/2/06, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
>> My mailer has done some font substitution in the following. I hope that
>> does not mean it has switched to rich text without telling me.
>
> Didn't look like it to me -- just UTF-8 text/plain.
Hooray!

>> (Cyrillic Order)
>> Аа Бб Гг Дд Ее Ƣƣ Ии Йй Кк Лл Ӆӆ Мм Нн Ӊӊ Оо Өө
>> Пп Рр Ҏҏ Rʀ Сс Тт Уу Ўў
>> Фф Хх Ҳҳ Шш Ъъ Ыы Iı Vv Ωω
>
> Why not Үү, rather than Vv (or Ѵѵ) to go with Өө? I was under the
> impression that ү was a semi-standard for languages that needed /y/.
Sounds sensible. I hadn't yet properly researched the distribution of /y/
letters -- I happened to know about izhitsa, though, and for some reason
decided to start with obsolete Russian than with modern non-Russian. Like
I said: work in progress, so I'm open to all suggestions. I kind of gently
dislike the straight-leg Үү since it seems too easily confusable with /u/,
especially in handwriting, but then I don't know the official handwritten
forms of either letter.

>> I'm going to have to get a handle on the breve/caron use in the Latin
>> form. I think I shall go for carons all round, also on N.
>
> Why not; I think Czech uses ň that way, for example.
>
> What about L-bar? Is Łł going to turn into Ľľ? (Note that my font
> displays LATIN CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER L WITH CARON as l-with-apostrophe;
> I believe this is Czech and/or Slovak typographical preference. That
> could throw a damper on your plans to go with carons all around. I
> know I find it annoying for Romanised Verdurian and Cadhinor, which
> use d-caron and t-caron, but pretty much all fonts display
> d-apostrophe and t-apostrophe instead, at least in lowercase, again
> due to Czech and/or Slovak... and "Caďinor" just looks wrong if you're
> used to carons as in "CAĎINOR".
L-caron looks, frankly, quite poor. The "combining apostrophe" form is not
just the Czechoslovakian preference for letters with a vertical ascender
of half-ascender, but also the Unicode default definiton of the glyph form
in those cases. I dislike it. On the other hand l-slash has been widely
used and abused for a whole variety of (historically) /l/-like sounds
(including /L\/, /w/, /M\/, /l_j/ and notably /K/) in the past. I think
I'm going to stick with it as the traditional form, and allow either form
of l-caron as a typographic variant. I'm seriously considering allowing
breve as a typographic variant of caron, too. L-breve might be ugly, but
I'm going to assume someone somewhere in the 3B post-soviet
renationalization reform committee decided to follow the maxim of "if in
doubt, let the user choose".

>> Jaŋalif, UTA, and Arabic orthographies, and maybe a brush with Turkic
>> Runes.
>
> Excellent.
>
> (I wonder what the Arabic orthography will turn out like... using
> plene writing as in Uyghur [IIRC], completely defective [in the
> technical sense] consonantal writing with one sign for each consonant
> phoneme, or some clever scheme of using different Arabic consonants to
> hint at vowel harmony, the way Ottoman Turkish did -- I think it used
> the "pharyngeal" versions to hint at back vowels and the "normal"
> versions to hint at front vowels for the consonants that came in
> pairs.)
I really don't know. The consonant set is easy, and well-provided for in
existing languages. The vowels, as you point out, are a bit trickier.

I'm thinking use of a decent set of vowel marks, plus some maitres
lectiones. The most obvious answer right now is one obligatory mater in or
before the first syllable of each word (or after the last?), with alif for
open words, ya for front words and waw for rounded words, on top of which
further vowel marking would be technically optional, but plentifully
allowed for. I need to research the various languages and language
families to come up with the best choices of symbols.

I had the gut feeling that the best example would be Tajik, but that turns
out to be a really poor system for the distinctions I need. I'm just going
to research everything and anything I can find that uses Arabic: Farsi,
Pashto, Pukhto, Tajik, Kurdish, Kashmiri, Urdu, Punjabi, Kazakh, Uyghur,
Kyrghiz, and whatever else I can find and learn about.




Paul





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