Re: Phonetics

Hi!

Joseph Fatula writes:
>...
> Actually, Cherokee throws in a different problem.  The Cherokee
> alphabet includes all but 4 of the characters of the Roman alphabet,
> then adds a bunch of characters unique to Cherokee.  One could
> describe Icelandic (for example) in the same way, using most of the
> Latin characters, then adding some unique to that language,
> pronouncing nearly all of the characters different than say, English.
> What objective criteria should we use to call Cherokee a separate
> alphabet, while keeping Icelandic under the Roman alphabet?
>...
Pragmatism?  And common sense?  I am sure you see immediately that
Icelandic pronunciation is quite similar to English if you compare how
Cherokee uses the letters...

But actually, there was a discussion on the Unicode list whether
Icelandic should have been better classified as an own script.  But
the discussion was quite short.

Note that Coptic was split off of Greek in Unicode only recently, so
indeed, classifications are not always obvious.  Also, ther is
discussion of split Arabic.  What was it that was quite incompatibly
different in style?  I forgot, sorry.

ObConlang: I used Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian once to create
one alphabet.  I did this because the style and design ideals of these
four are quite compatible so that with the right font (I used DejaVu),
the result is quite nice looking.  Usually Armenian seems to be left
out of this group for whatever reason.  There is even a Black Letter
font that looks quite great and really similar to German Black Letter
style.  (I included that in my Script Teacher for advanced
learners. :-)).

BTW, anyone interested in a Black Letter mode for my Script Teacher?

**Henrik