Re: CHAT: Reformed Latin-script writing for natlangs

From: "Herman Miller" <hmiller@...>

[There's a whole page of the Unicode book (the second half of Latin
Extended
Additional) that's filled with mostly characters necessary for writing
Vietnamese (specifically from U+1EA0 to U+1EF9). That's a lot of extra
characters!]

(First of all, for some reason quoted text isn't marked with right
carats or anything!  I gotta fix this problem.)

Microsoft uses these precomposed characters, most allocated to Latin
Extended Additional (in Unicode); while it requires many more
characters, it looks cleaner, since combining marks might not get placed
exactly correctly, and two combining marks (required for Vietnamese)
would just run over each other, and then you have a convoluted mess.
I'd prefer the precomposed characters a lot better, since Unicode is
more and more becoming the de facto standard for multilingual and
multiscript usage.

(One neat thing about Internet Explorer 5.x: you can install one font
each for Japanese, Korean, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese,
as well as Arabic, Thai, Hebrew, and Vietnamese using extended fonts
like the newest versions of Arial, Courier New, Tahoma and Times New
Roman.  (Only Tahoma accomodates Thai).  But some fonts, which aren't
all that attractive, are also installed, such as Traditional Arabic,
Arabic Transparent, David and Miriam Hebrew fonts, and Angsana and
Cordia Thai fonts.

Office 97 and later allows installation of even more Far East fonts --
my favorite is the largest, called BatangChe, used for Korean.  (Korean
fonts are the largest because they contain not only Hanja (Chinese
logograms), but precomposed Hangul syllabic blocks.  The font is over 10
meg in size... OUCH....

I'm way off topic, but I felt led to inform about Unicode-ready fonts of
all types.  In fact, check out http://www.kiarchive.ru (forgot the US
mirror) and browse the web folders; for example, go to Win, then Fonts,
then TrueType, and look at all the .zip files of all sorts of fonts.
Metropol and Vera Humana are two really good fonts which work in
extended Latin, Cyrillic and Greek.  (And tons of 8-bit fonts which just
happens to include a simple Tengwar font.)

I'm a big font nut, you can probably tell.,

Danny

>The tone marks are, and I don't remember what order they come in:
>none: mid/level tone
>acute accent: high/rising tone
>grave accent: low/falling tone
>hook (a small ? without the dot): falling-rising tone (Mandarin tone 3)
>tilde: high glottalized
>dot below (the only subscripted diacritic): low glottalized
>
>Now I like the way tones are marked, but I'd use a breve for the
>fall-rise tone and diaeresis for the low glottalized tone (I personally
>don't like underwritten marks unless it marks an open vowel like Yoruba
>etc. does; this would work for Vietnamese too).
You could mark the creaky voice with (say) an apostrophe after the
letter
and save a couple of diacritics.

>  I just think the
>consonant conventions are a bit eccentric.  I would rather use more
>globally recognizable phonoorthograhy.  Like z for [z] instead of d,
>since z is not used.  S should be [s] and x should be [x].
Is [x] often spelled <x> other than in IPA transcriptions? I'm not sure
what the most common spelling is, but I'd guess probably <h> or <kh>.

>Any other ideas from the list?  Let's make some conscripts for
natlangs.
>(I am seriously thinking of readapting a Thai-Lao-Myanmar-Khmer-like SE
>Asian alphasyllabry for Vietnamese; wasn't that done in the past with
>the Cham [?] script?
Lhörr-têk (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/Jarda/Lhoerr-uni.html) is a
writing
system that I developed to represent the distinctive sounds of human
(and
fictional non-human) languages in a way similar to Visible Speech, but
allowing more phonetic distinctions. In principle it could be used or
adapted to write any spoken language.

--
languages of
Azir------> ----<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
    h i l r i . o         "If all Printers were determin'd not to print
any
     m l e @ o c m       thing till they were sure it would offend no
body,
   (Herman Miller)       there would be very little printed." -Ben
Franklin