Arabic transliteration/Keebler's Elves now make Halvah!

>From: John Cowan <cowan@...>
>Daniel A. Wier scripsit:
>
> > The situation is that these people are the modern-day descendants of
>ancient
> > (as in well over 10,000 B.C.) Mesopotamian Elves who later adopted
>Sumerian,
>
>What does it mean to call them "Elves"?  Live for ever unless killed,
>reincarnate in their descendants?  Pointy ears?  Or just tall and skinny?
Well... yes they have pointy ears and are tall and slender.  (Not
tremendously tall; males average over 183 cm/6 ft in height; females just
under that.)  And they live quite a while, often in excess of 160 years; the
known record is 256.  Being a mostly Islamic (over 90%, and most of those
Sufi at that) race, they don't believe in reincarnation, but there is
evidence of various ancient cults which combined the father-mother-child
cult (Isis-Osiris-Horus in Egypt, I only remember Ishtar in Mesopotamia)
with Aryan beliefs (possibly proto-Hinduism), which may or may not have
included reincarnation.

But all in all they're basically a mutation of human; they've become a
distinct species, but they can interbreed with humans, and their offspring
are fertile (though less so; half-elves rarely have more than two children).

(I'm not on conculture; I had to leave the list because I get too many posts
as it is.)

> > thaa'      ls (voiceless lat. fric.; norm. written tl)
> > dhaal      lz (voiced lat. fric.; norm. written dl)
>
>The romanizations tl and dl look more suitable to affricates.
>(The Arabic forms seem fine).  Maybe you should use affricates,
>or else change the romanizations to somethin like "hl" and "ll"?
Yeah, I based my transcriptions on common English represenations of certain
Native American languages such as Tlingit (the name of which really begins
with the sound of Welsh ll, not Navajo tl; likewise for the name/place
Seattle < _se?ahl_).  In Simplified Tech (I nickname it 'Tech Jr.') some
fricatives and their corresponding affricates are allophones.  (But not so
in Traditional Tech.)  That means:

tl = hl, Kling. thl (I use ls) or tl
dl = Dl (I use lz) or dl
x = X (uvular) or qX
z = z or dz
s = s or ts
ss always = ts'
dd always = c'
zz always = tl'
` = voiced glottal or pharyngeal fricative
gg = R (uvular fric.) or GR (uvular affricate)
f = f or pf  (v never = bv)

Also, the retroflex series, alveolar n, r and l, and N (velar 'ng') are not
marked, and in Simplified, are ignored (but n before k, g, x, gg, of course,
is pronounced [N])

Speaking of Arabic transliteration, there is another way than what i use
privately and it uses single characters case sensitive; it's called Qalam
'pen' and can be found at:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/dmulholl/info/Qalam.txt

It uses conventions like this:

hamza   '
'alef   aa
thaa'   th
jym     j
Haa'    H
khaa'   kh
daal    d
dhaal   dh
raa'    r
shyn    sh
Saad    S
Daad    D
Taa'    T
Zaa'    Z
`ayn    `
ghayn   gh
(and ta marbuwTah is either represented as h or t -- same as haa' and taa'!)

As you can see, there are problems with this.  Still doesn't matter to me, I
got several excellent fonts in Unicode for Arabic/Persian script; anybody
want 'em?

Danny
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