Re: digraphs

In the last episode, (On Sunday 08 July 2007 16:08:17), R A Brown wrote:
> Jeff Rollin wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > So again, sorry if my soapboxing ruffled feathers, that certainly wasn't
> > the idea.
>
> I assumed it wasn't, which is why I didn't reply immediately - I might
> have ruffled other feathers. My over-sensitive feathers were a bit
> ruffled - but apology readily accepted.
> ---------------------------------
>
> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>  > Hallo!
>  >
>  > On Sat, 7 Jul 2007 12:49:36 +0100, Jeff Rollin wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>  >>[...] You're also right that "if a conlang
>  >>has a system of lenition similar to Gaelic", it makes sense to use
>
> digraphs
>
>  >>to represent /v/ and /f/.
>  >
>  > Actually, the digraphs are only a jury-rig.  In the actual Irish uncial
>  > script, no h-digraphs are used.
>
> Yes, but I wrote _Gaelic_, not _Irish_. As far I know, the Scots version
> is not ever written in Irish uncials. Also, I understand, the uncial
> script is not much used now in Ireland, except for road signs and public
> notices (I guess tourism is a factor here - it looks more attractive).
> My understanding is that since the mid-20th cent Irish has been written
> in the Roman alphabet and that lenited consonants have always been
> shown, as they are in Scots Gaelic, by digraphs with _h_ and not with a
> dot above the letter.
>
> I completely fail to see why digraphs with -h are more 'jury rigged'
> than using a dot (or any other diacritic) to show lenition. In any case,
> the use of digraphs with -h to show lenited plosives has been common in
> transcrptions of Biblical Hebrew. I suspect I could find other examples
> also.
>
>  >Instead, they use dots above the letters, which is far more elegant.
>
> Anglophones generally don't find diacritics elegant  ;)
>
True; but we're being exposed to more and more these days. And I doubt twenty
years ago you could have gotten away with a film with a romantic subplot in
which most of the lovers' dialogue is in a fictional language, or a film
about Jesus in Aramaic, or a film about the Mayans in Mayan.

What I find objectionable about diacritics is when the page is littered with
them, but that's at least as much the fault of the Romans, who didn't bother
to use an alphabet with a discrete symbol for every sound known to man (the
heathens!). A previous version of Velyan used ĝ and ł and tildes and ŧ's and
ś as well as ŝ and goodness knows what. Spanish does this well - it indicates
stress with an acute, but only when irregular; and it only uses two other
diacritics (what we call tilde, which is actually the generic Spanish word
for "(grave or acute) accent or diacritic", and umlaut). Ironically one of
the languages of North America in /least/ need of diacritics when written in
the Roman alphabet is also one that's written with a different writing system
(Inuktitut). I find reading about North American native and Caucasian
languages can be very off-putting, as they really weren't built with the
Latin alphabet in mind (or rather the reverse). And that's when dealing with
pages where, thanks to Unicode, all the right symbols are used, never mind a
few years ago when we were all limited to ISO-LATIN-1 or even US-ASCII.

Jeff
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