Re: sorry Mark Lang...
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, June 17, 2004, 22:59 |
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You may certainly address me as Marcos! Many people do so in person.
Whups, missing vowel. It's "thereeds.org" - it comes from "the Reeds";
that is, it's my family's website.
Full URL, corrected and verified via copy and paste:
http://thereeds.org/~mark/conlang/okaikiar
> That's what I wanted to see.
You can see samples and a description; the interactive program that will
render any (legal in Okaikiar phonology) text you type in
seems to be malfunctioning at the moment, however.
> Vocab. check: abugida? abjad? Damn my ignorance of Hebrew/Arabic scripts!
These terms might have been introduced in Peter T. Daniels'
_The_World's_Writing_Systems_, but I think they have fairly wide
currency now. An "abjad" is sometimes more awkwardly called a
"consonantary" - it's an alphabet with symbols only for the consonants.
There may be some overloaded symbols that sometimes represent vowels, or
diacritics that can be added to make the vowels explicit, but basically
the primary symbols are consonants and vowels are given short shrift.
Arabic and Hebrew are examples. Tolkein's Elvish script Tengwar
in similar, but since the vowel marks are mandatory in most modes, I
don't know if it qualifies as an abjad.
An "abugida" is sometimes called an "alphasyllabary". It's an alphabet,
but a bare consonant symbol actually represents an entire syllable,
containing that consonant plus a default vowel. Modifications or
additions to the bare consonant indicate a different vowel or the
absence of any vowel. The vowels also have their own letters, but these
are not used except for syllables that contain no consonant. The
Devanagari script - used by Sanskrit and Hindi, and the ancestor of
many other Indic writing system - is like this.
> I was very proud of my macroned o, in Teonaht, but it was by far the most
> common vowel next to a, and when I was faced with webifying my project I had
> to dispense with it, although it still dominates my printed materials.
> roman script. Is there anyway, these days, to represent a macron in html?
Not if you consider õ "arduous". :) You can use the Unicode
points for macronned letters - for instance, o with macron is ō
But it's best if you have an editor that will handle such details
for you. I use vim, for instance, so I can insert an o with a macron
by typing control-K (the "special character" indicator), followed by
the o, followed by a - to represent the macron, and on my screen I see
a macronned o. I then have the option when saving it of doing so in
UTF-8 so that it stays a literal macronned o in the HTML, or of
converting it to HTML entities such as the above ō which
has the advantage of looking right in the browser even if it or
the web server misinterprets the file as something other than UTF-8.
The diacritics are all mnemonic: - for macron, ' for acute accent, > for
circumflex, < for caron, ( for breve, ~ for tilde, ! for grave accent
(well, okay, that one's less mnemonic; I don't know why not `), / for
slash-through (as in ø), . for dot below, ',' for cedilla, etc,
etc.
> Hmmm. You could join Ill Bethisad if you haven't already.
I've read some about that project, but I'm not sure how much time I'd be
able to devote to it.
> That was supposed to be Teonaht, but she is a very hybrid creature, and much
> about her is not at all IE.
What is she hybridized with?
-Mark . . . er, rats. Old habits die hard. I mean:
-Marcos
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