Re: New cyriliic orthography for WT6b

At 15:19 -0500 19.1.2000, Paul Bennett wrote:
>
>Can anyone show me an example?  I'm toying with making a devanagari-derived
>script, and I'm not sure which directions to go in, as most variations I've
>seen have been for languages with a substantially Sanskrit phonology.
You may want to check out the Tibetan alphabet, and the alphabets used in
South-East Asia.  They are strictly speaking not derived from Devanagari
itself, but from various earlier forms -- all, including Devanagari,
ultimately derived from the Brahmi script of ca 200 BCE.  There is also the
hP`ags-pa ['phagba] script, a script derived from Tibetan in the 13th
century CE and intended for writing Mongolian, Chinese and other languages
of the empire of Khubilai Khan.  It is interesting in the fact that it is
vritten vertically and all the vowel signs are written beneath the
preceding consonant, which gives hP`ags-pa a different "feel" from other
Brahmic scripts.

Nowadays diacritical dots and dashes below letters are used in India to eke
out Devanagari.  The only graph for a non-sanskritic sound known from
pre-modern times is a conjunct {ys} or {sj} to represent [z] in Central
Asian manuscripts.

>(I don't think phonology is the right word, but it's the closest I can come
>up with.)
Seems appropriate to me.



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto: bpj@...> <mailto: melroch@...>
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