Re: A question on vowel orthography

Roger Mills writes:
 > Tim May wrote:
 >
 > >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.
 >
 >
 > My personal preferences would be :
 > /o/ "o"
 > /Q/ " ,Ar (B"  ograve or ALT0242 as 1st choice---  ,Ae (B (html?) ALT0229 2nd choice--
 > a-ring is closer to the phonetic truth, but the grave accent can generally
 > be used to indicate a more open vowel quality.  Also, on the Intl. keyboard,
 > it's easier to type; a-ring (for me at least) requires a separate trip to
 > the Num. keypad (it's also in the keyboard, but I rarely use it, so haven't
 > memorized its location, as I have L-ALT-z for   ,Af (B (ash)).
 >  I don't like the appearance of @ in text, so usually use  ,Ak (B (euml, ALT0235).
 > If "y" is not otherwise used, it could be schwa. Any symbol is OK, as long
 > as it explained.........
 > (The above applies to PC/Windows; Macs and others may differ)

I quite agree about the appearance of "@", but "y" is already
employed.  In an ideal romanized environment I can use a real schwa,
of course.  It's quite difficult to type any alternate characters on a
US keyboard with embedded keypad in Linux*, so for a non-ideal
situation I'd rather keep it to things in plain ASCII.  I could
approximate " ,Ar (B" with "o`", or " ,Ae (B" with "&" - ugly, but I've already
compromised that by using "@".  Perhaps " ,Ak (B" written "e"" and " ,Ar (B"
written "o`", but I think I might prefer to keep a one symbol=one
symbol correlation at the expense of beauty (as this version can never
be very beautiful.

* (That said, within Emacs I can enter text in cyrillic, japanese,
  chinese, devanagari, hebrew, tibetan, lao... I don't have the fonts
  for half of them.  There are entry methods for European languages
  too, so if I find one with the characters I want and learn to use
  it, I should be able to manage anything.  There's one for the IPA,
  for that matter...    ,0: (B  ,02 (B  ,0& (B  ,0$ (B  $(3"8!!"Y"8"S"4!""8!& (B (I don't know if
  this'll even encode, and it's just gibberish)

 > >
 > >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).
 >
 > In a "native" script all bets are off; diacritics could be irrelevant.  In
 > the Kash alphabet, for ex., u is the mirror image of i, o is the inversion
 > of e.  (If I ever get around to related languages/dialects, symbols for
 > E,Q,y,@ et al. will be necessary)