Re: Tech's Hacek

I can't remember if I replied to this e-mail or not! If I'm replying twice,
my apologies. I had to re-install Windows AGAIN, so I got really distracted.

From: "Emily Zilch" <emily0@...>

> "For example, 'tying together, marriage' is _ban^d_ (the ^ should be a
> caron/hac^ek); its passive, _b@n^d_ (@ = inverted e, that is, 'schwa'),
> means 'house, home, family, community', close to German _Bund_."
>
> Does this hacek indicate, as I have seen in most other cases, that it
> is part of a unitary, prenasalised consonant rather than being part of
> a consonant cluster? For example, Sinhalese uses this romanisation
> scheme to distinguish nasal + C v. prenasalised C, which *do* form
> minimally contrastive pairs.
In my still-tentative Latin orthography for Tech, a letter with a hacek is a
retroflex affricate, nasal, lateral or rhotic flap. The affricates become
palatoalveolar before the vowels <e>, <i> or the palatalizing mark (which
could be <i-dieresis> or an acute accent). So <n^> - you could type it <^n>
if you prefer - is /n`/. The /d/ afterwards would probably assimilate to
[d`].

My Cyrillic orthography is much more set in stone. In fact, I'm probably
going to use that as the main script for two reasons: the largest Tech
community is in the South Caucasus, and Cyrillic is better suited to the
phonology, having a soft sign and a hard sign, and more letters for
affricates than Latin.