Re: A question on vowel orthography

En réponse à Tim May <butsuri@...>:

> 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).
>
Funny enough, this language has the same vocalic inventory as my conlang Tj'a-
ts'a~n (although in Tj'a-ts'a~n the schwa is not phonemic, but only acts as an
optional svarabakhti vowel). Moreover, in Tj'a-ts'a~n the front unrounded
vowels are related to their back rounded equivalents by a phenomenon of vowel
harmony (Tj'a-ts'a~n relies heavily on harmony. In fact, there is also a
consonant harmony! :)) Both play a role in the form of the prefix of the word
Tj'a-ts'a~n itself by the way :)) ).

I had the same problem with writing /a/ and /Q/. But since the Roman script was
only a transliteration (the native script is an ideographic one), I decided not
to look for an optimal solution and just use something simple that I could
remember easily. So I decided to use |á| (a-acute, ASCIIfied as |'a|) for /a/
and |a| for /Q/. Using a diacritic to mark /Q/ just looked not right to me (but
I admit that I never thought of a-ring. Just a problem with that one: how do
you ASCIIfy it?) and the connection between /a/ and /Q/ stayed obvious this
way. Also, the ASCIIfication fitted with the rest of the transliteration (which
has strange symbols like b-tilde, g-tilde and n-tilde, all transliterated with
a beginning tilde: |~b|, |~g| and |~n|).

As for the schwa, since it's not phonemic, it's normally not written, but to
emphasize the actual pronunciation it may be indicated by the apostrophe |'|.
Since the schwa never appears near a vowel, no ambiguity can arise.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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