Re: New cyriliic orthography for WT6b

On 19 Jan 00, at 12:33, John Cowan wrote:

> Paul Bennett wrote:
>
> > It's a Cyrillic orthography (possibly the second-most popular 'non-native'
> > conlang orthog?), but not a straightforward Russian one.
>
> Latin is #1 far and away; whether Cyrillic or Arabic is next is a question.
> After that, probably Devanagari, far down the list.
Well I never.  I hadn't any idea about devanagari, that's kinda good to
know.

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.

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

> > The orthography is inspired by the Abkhaz version of the Cyrillic alphabet,
> > rather than the standard Russian version, and there are a few other chars
> > poached from various other langs, as well as few diacritic- and digraph-
> > combinations of my own.
>
> I suggest representing your Latin N~ with U+04A4/A5, CYRILLIC CAPITAL/SMALL
> LIGATURE EN GHE.
>
Yes, that looks more suitable.  I was working from paper copies of the
various cyrillic alphabets, and mustn't've got as good an idea as if I'd
studied the whole character set as a whole.

Any suggestions as to what to do with {n^}, the uvular nasal?  Perhaps
04A2/A3, the "CYRILLIC EN WITH DESCENDER"?  I don't know whether I have an
example of its use in my notes, hold on....

[some time later:]

Kirghiz, Kazakh and Turkmen have the "EN WITH DESCENDER" for /N/
Chukchee has 04C7/C8 ("CYRILLIC EN WITH HOOK") for /N/, which personally I
find ugly, so shall avoid for now.

The nasals are now:

M   m   m    041C  043C  Em
N   n   n    041D  043D  En
N~  n~  N    04A4  04A5  /En+gE/ digraph
N^  n^  N\   04A2  04A3  Turkmen /eN/