Re: Kjaginic: 8 points of articulation

On Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:00:48 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:

> This is how Tengwar fonts work. The normally
>tall rectangular Tengwar table is mapped sideways
>to the physical keys of the broad rectangular
>QWERTY keyboard. Since a picture says more than 1K
>words I uploaded one:
>
>|<http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm94/melroch_aestan/tengwar-basic-layout.png>
Forgot about that; another good example.  In fact it reminds me I once found
one Tengwar font in which the tengwar were bound to keys related to their
values in some English mode, and it was _missing_ the characters that that
mode didn't use.  Excruciating.

>> Ämne: Re: [CONLANG] Kjaginic: 8 points of
>> articulation Från: Herman Miller
>> <hmiller@...>
>>
>> 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?
>
>The established practice for Slavic languages is
>to use extended stem series III tengwar for palatal
>stops and affricates and grade 1 & 2 (descending-stem)
>tengwar for retroflex affricates.  I'd rather reverse
>that, for obvious reasons, but something similar could
>be applied to Chinese, so that grade 1 & 2 are q and j
>and extended-stem are ch and zh, and Tolkien's otherwise
>unneeded symbol for [r_0] could be used for sh, and
>series III grade 3 for x.
Not obvious to me, unless you're analysing the palatal ones as underlyingly
stops even in languages where they aren't.

Anyway if I were making a Tengwar mode for Mandarin I'd prefer not to give
Pinyin _q j x_ their own symbols, given that they're purely allophonic: let
those realisations be determined by the frontness of the vowel, or if need
be use the double-underdot tehta on some other symbol.

I forget if it was here that this was being said, recently, but it's true --
Pinyin is not a very nice romanisation if you like tidy analyses.
Overspecifies several subphonemic variations as an expedient to teaching
standard Mandarin pronunciation.  (And then there's the whole ugly #wei #you
~ -ui -iu, and dropping of umlaut on the u sometimes, which don't even
correspond to things Mandarin does!  Ugly.)

Alex