On Wed, 3 May 2000 11:59:06 -0500, "Daniel A. Wier" <DaWier@...>
wrote:
>One of my current projects is trying to see if the writing of some
>languages written in Latin script -- anything from Irish to
>Vietnamese -- could be improved, simplified, clarified, and what not.
Cool project!
>Vietnamese comes to mind, first of all. I just taught myself how to
>_pronounce_ the language (but I still have no idea what the words mean),
>and what always threw me off is how diacritics are stacked because some
>mark vowel quality, and others mark tone. And there are six tones in
>Vietnamese for eleven vowels. Latin script is just not able to easily
>record a language like that! Plus you have some unusual consonant
>orthographic conventions.
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!
>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