Re: Vowels in Finlaesk

On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 02:21:00 -0400, Paul Bennett
<paul.w.bennett@...> wrote:

> I'm having a small crisis over the vowels in Finlaesk.
>
> The two-penny tour: It's what happened to the Old Icelandic spoken by
> the settlers of Vinland (North America) in its AU.
>
> The current vowel set is as follows:
>
>    i i: i~ y y: y~         u u: u~
>    e e: e~ 2 2: 2~ @ @: @~ o o: o~
>    E E: E~ 9 9: 9~         O O: O~
>     a a: a~              A A: A~
>
> Unfortunately, it seems to have travelled the exact opposite direction
> from Old Norse that it *should* have
Please accept my apologies for such a very bad post, by the way. I'd been
meaning to write about my problem for several hours, and finally did so
after taking a sleeping pill and before going to bed.

I think I'm going to go with several of the advices given, and carry out
both breaking and merging, step by step. It's going to mean a heck of a
lot of tearing down and rebuilding (I've got concultural notes more than
started, in addition to paradigm tables), but I was going to hit the
paradigm tables quite hard anyway. I have too many conjugations and
declensions both, and several of them are already quite close to eachother.

Taking the purely ON vowels per BPJ:

:    i i:    y y:        u   u:
:
:      e:
:
:    E E:    9 9:        o   o:
:
:                    A   Q   Q:
:
:    Ei  9y  Qu

I think my sound changes would be something like...

i > i\
y > u
y: > ju
i: > i
e: > e
E > a
E: > E
9 > ew
9: > jo
u > @
u: > o:
o > wo
o: > wo:
Q > o
Q: > o:
Ei > aj
9y > oj
Qu > Aw

Leading to:

   i     i\ u
    e e: @  o o:
     E
      a    A

(plus existing /j/ and /w/ semivowels)

All my V~ come from VN sequences following a long vowel (which essentially
feels like a form of stress-based vowel reduction), so I'm going to limit
nasals to short vowels, and further to those short vowels that are allowed
in unstressed syllables (therefore making the above table for stressed
syllables only).

The allowed vowels in unstressed syllables will be:

   i i~      u u~
        @ @~
             A A~

Now all I need is a new orthography for this stuff, and I can get to the
business of doing the search-and-replace in the Wiki.

I'm thinking of:

   i    į u
    e é ų o ó
     ę
      a  ą

   i ī    u ū
      ų ų̄
          ą ą̄

For the Unicode-impaired, that's

   i i-ogonek u
    e e-acute u-ogonek o o-acute
     e-ogonek
      a a-ogonek

   i i-macron u u-macron
    u-ogonek u-ogonek-macron
              a-ogonek a-ogonek-macron

I'm not entirely sure of the usage of ogonek here, to be honest. Other
ideas I've had are ae-ligature for a, a for a-ogonek, oe-ligature for
u-ogonek and ue-ligature for i-ogonek.



Once again I'm throwing the question to the floor. All comments and
suggestions still solicited,



Thanks,



Paul



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