Re: USAGE: An example of script adaptation to large phonologies

>From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
>Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 12:35:45 -0400
>
>It's because of incompatibilities like these that I hesitate to use
>anything beyond 7-bit ASCII on email, although I hate case-sensitive
>phonetic notation as much as you do. I hate digraphs/trigraphs/... as
>well, but without digraphs, I'd have even less symbols to use for my
>conlang's orthography :-(
I have the same problem since many of my conlangs tend to have rather large
phonologies -- especially in the consonants, but with only five vowel
characters vowels can be an even bigger problem.  Take a lang like
Graavgaaln.  I have six front open vowels, five front rounded vowels, four
central vowels, four back rounded vowels and four back unrounded!  That's 23
vowels!  My only option HTML was to go with digraphs.  Now in e-mail some of
those end up as tetragraphs!  Eg. o/o/ which is as ugly as homemade sin, but
what's a guy to do??  I have five characters to represent 23 vowels!  Drat
unt pfooey!  Graavgaaln frequently resorts to digraphs for consonant
representation, too, which can be confusing with things like ng /N/ vs. ng
/ng/ or rv representing a double articulated consonant vs. rv representing a
series of consonants.  I don't like it but the native script isn't e-mail
compatable.

Then I have other langs like Lrahran, where all the consonants tend to
cluster around a feature or small set of features.  Latin alphabet only has
one character to represent a lateral sound -- L. So what do I do with
retroflex, labio-velarized, palatalized variants?  It's either digraphs or
HORRIFYING things like C=labio-velarized lateral aproximant!  I can't abide
that sort of mapping so I'm stuck with digraphs.  Cess la vie.  (And no I
didn't misspell that.)

Adam


>
> > (Speaking of Caucasian languages, Adyghe adds only one letter to the
> > Russian Cyrillic alphabet, the _palochka_ which is identical to our
> > capital I, marking aspirates mostly. What happens is that you have the
> > tense uvular stop written as a *** T E T R A G R A P H ***.)
>[snip]
>
>*shudder* :-P
>
>
>T
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com.