Re: A question on vowel orthography

Tim May wrote:
>
>I've been thinking about my nascent conlang, LC-01, and I've
>tentatively decided on the following vocalic inventory.
>
>             Front     Central     Back
>
>    Close     /i/                  /u/
>
>
>
>    Mid       /e/        /@/       /o/
>
>
>
>    Open      /a/                  /Q/
>
>
>Not terribly exciting perhaps, but I can pronounce them all, and they
>form a fairly neat set.  Actually, the mid vowels could be E and O, or
>somewhere between, so that they're closer to the same level as @.  The
>rounding of the back vowels isn't that important either.
>
>
>In ASCII, though, I'm not sure what to do with /o/ and /Q/.  The rest
>of the vowels have pretty obvious latin equivalents, except /@/, which
>I'll probably leave as @.  /o/ and /Q/ are both "o" in my experience,
>though (certainly in English).  So I could use a plain "o" for one,
>and with a diacritic for the other.  But which way round would be
>best, and what diacritic, I don't know.
>
>Now, in the script I'm making, there'll be some kind of relation
>between the symbols for equivalent front and back vowels (a diacritic
>or something similar).  So it would also be possible to make /o/ "o"
>and /Q/ "a" with a diacritic.  But again, I don't know which one would
>be best.  (Also, this would suggest that /u/ should be "i" with a
>diacritic, which would hardly be intuitive).
I'd like to suggest "å" (a-ring) for /Q/. It's used for /o/ and /o:/ in the
Nordic langs (actual height in different dialects span most of the back of
the vowel quadrilateral), and is IIRC used for [Q] in the orthography of
some dialects in northern Italy.

                                                     Andreas

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