Re: Kjaginic: 8 points of articulation

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:15:11 -0400, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

>Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>
>> It seems to me like Kjaginic is best regarded as
>> similar to the Tengwar: a basic grid of symbols
>> where the columns can be assigned to PsOA and the
>> rows to MsOA according to the needs of the
>> language to be written!
Ah, good point.

>Still, I need an assignment of glyphs to characters
>that makes sense, in order to create the font for Kjaginic. So far I've
>been using mostly IPA characters, which has the advantage that text
>written in Kjaginic is still readable without the Kjaginic font.
I'm sure the Unicode purists would tut at you for this sort of thing.  This
is what the private use area is for, they'd admonish.

>Or I could come up with a different arrangement of the more commonly
>needded symbols for convenience in typing, e.g.:
>
>             1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8
>stop        Q q  W w  E e  R r  T t  Y y  U u  I i
[...]
>The vowels could use the top row of the keyboard; "Kjaginic" could be
>written "YB3y1c1R" (as Standard Tirelat uses the retroflex stop symbols
>for the alveolar affricates). But learning to type with this keyboard
>arrangement would be time-consuming and error-prone.
Aha, that's exactly what I was just asking for in that other thread, input
methods for a conlang that follow the internal logic of the script.  I like
it, in a way transcending questions of pragmatism for people raised on
Qwerty: it's the keyboard native Kjaginic speakers might have designed for
themselves, or a good approximation at least.

Too bad this wouldn't be readable in the plain, though.

>> Interestingly fan usage has resurrected the rows
>> for aspirated stops which Tolkien mentioned as
>> being preserved as mere variants of the fricative
>> rows but did not include in his table for use as
>> affricates in languages like German!
>
>Hmm, that would work if the language only has voiceless affricates (or
>if Tolkien had symbols for both voiced and voiceless aspirated stops).
Certainly by symmetry and analogy, if not by explicit provision.  They
naturally fill a gap.  Voicing is doubling the bow; aspiration is extending
the stem in both directions; do both, what have you got but a voiced aspirate.

>Languages like Chinese (with both aspirated stops and affricates) could
>use the voiceless stop symbols for aspirated stops. Does any language
>have voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops along with affricates?
Most definitely.  Most of the time, when a language (especially one with a
rich obstruent series) has affricates, they are the realisation of the
logical stops at particular points of articulation.  Aspiration otoh is a
phonation, like voicelessness and modal voicing, and so orthogonal.  You
expect e.g. /tS_h tS dZ/ to exist exactly parallel to /t_h t d/, if the lang
has the requisite POAs and phonations.

A few specific examples off the top of my head: many Indic langs; Wu
Chinese; Burmese; Burushaski.

Alex