Re: Orthography help needed

Mark wrote:

"Okay, I'm currently working on a small side-language (called ['r\Vm,bjUgv])
which is in need of an orthography.  The problem is that its phoneme set
consists of the entire repertoire of phones in (my 'lect of) English, and
despite this phonological similarity I refuse to go the English route and
overload the symbols.

"So far, I'm thinking that <c> for [S] and <j> for [Z] seem reasonable.
Dunno what to do about [D], [N] and [T], though.   I'm reluctant to
introduce <ð>, <ŋ>, and <þ> or <θ> for them, and there's certainly no
obious mapping from <q> and <x> to any pair of those sounds.

What are those characters? They aren't readable by me.

In any case, you could use edh for /D/, n~ for /N/ (Tolkien did this in
older versions of Quenya), and thorn for /T/. Or: dh, ng, th. What are you
using <q> and <x> for? <q> could represent /N/; if you used <x> for /S/ (as
in Maltese, Basque, and some Mesoamerican languages), you could use <c> for
/T/ (as in Castilian). And maybe you could use <dd> for /D/, as in Welsh.

"And the vowels!  I'm obviously going to have to do quasi-overloading here
with diacritical marks; I'm opting for a typical "long"/"short" distinction,
probably indicated with a macron,

If you send something in your language to the list, please do me a favour by
using, e.g., : or ' after the vowel (or, if possible, Latin-1 encoding,
with, for ex., acutes or circumflexes). Thanks!

"that really indicates quality rather than quantity: /e/ = [E], /e:/ = [e],
/i/ = [I], /i:/ = [i], /o/ = [O], /o:/ = [o], /u/ = [U], /u:/ = [u].

Interesting system.

"But that still doesn't quite solve the problem.  Assuming /a:/ represents
[a], for instance, what does /a/ represent: [V] or [&]?  How do I represent
the other one?

<a> could represent [V], and ae-ligature could represent [&].

"And what about [@]?  The Lojban solution of using <y> for [@] isn't
available since <y> is used for [j], and I've never been completely happy
with <'>, which is what I used to represent [@] in Okaikiar."

Albanian writes it as e-trema. Unless you want as few diacritics as
possible.

Trebor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Trebor1990
"If you pulled the wings off a fly, would it then be called a walk?"

Reply