Re: Minza spelling reform

Herman Miller skrev:

> One thing I'm not sure about is whether it's a good thing to use "ǧ" (g
> with wedge/caron) to represent [G]. I think it's nice that most of the
> accented consonants (except l-slash, ł) use the same diacritic (a
> wedge), but on the web page "ǧ" shows up in a different font than the
> rest of the text since it's not in the default Times New Roman font (and
> I suspect not in most readers' default web fonts either). And I don't
> even know what sounds are typically written with g-wedge, so I don't
> know how unusual it would be to use it to represent [G]. I was
> considering "ğ" (g-breve) for a while, but I liked the symmetry of using
> the wedge for everything.
The most well-known use of g-wedge is as a device in transliterating
Arabic, since the letter pronounced [dZ] in other places is pronounced
[g] in Egyptian Arabic, so from that perspective g-wedhe for [G] is
dead wrong.  Semiticists and Indologists generally use g with a dot
above and Germanicists use g with a line through the descender, while
Turkicists use g-breve and Mongolianists gamma.  I would recommend
g-dot since it is in the Latin Extended A range and hence in Times
New Roman, but I have another more radical suggestion, namely to use
q (yes /kju:/!) since the Arabic letter usually transliterated q
is pronounced [G] or [R] in Persian.  The UniPers suggested Roman
alphabet for Persian uses q generally for [G]/[R].  Simplified
phonetic transcription of Icelandic also uses q for [G], since
Icelandic can then be transcribed using the characters on an
ordinary Icelandic keyboard, using I Y ö e for /I Y 2 E/.

I also have to admit that my conlang family Sohlob also
uses q for /G/.


--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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