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A question on vowel orthography

From:Tim May <butsuri@...>
Date:Sunday, May 19, 2002, 15:07
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).

Replies

Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...>
Arnt Richard Johansen <arntrich@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>