Re: Chemehuevi orthography (was: Re: non-English WEB sites)

On Friday 25 April 2003 01:59 pm, Dirk Elzinga wrote:

> So the orthographic problem is whether to represent these final vowels
> or not. That is, should /aipatsi/ be written <aipats> or <aipatsi>? I
> can see good reasons for doing it either way; I can also see drawbacks.
> I'm hoping that the Chemehuevis themselves will settle on a solution
> which makes sense to them. Personally, I lean towards not including
> final vowels, but I'm willing to let them decide.
        Two questions: first, are the final vowels ever long? I'm just curious to see
what the distribution of long vowels are. Second, is /1/ ever a final vowel?
If /1/ is never a final vowel, then you could settle on a midway compromise
by marking the final vowel, but with some diacritic[1]. Hence something like
aipatsî and naro'ô. (I chose the circumflex because it is more visible over
an "i" than an acute or grave accent[2].) Although I suppose that a solution
for ü could be made if it ever occurs finally...maybe just use an accented
character like ú or ù. Too bad that /1/ isn't represented by |y|; then you
could just use ä ï ö ü ÿ to indicated final vowels. (Just sticking with
latin-1 encoding here.)
        You could also use this system to indicate vowels that shorten:
|tÿmpï| "money, rock" (I'm using |y| for /1/ just to be clear, that's all)
|tyympä| "mouth"
        I don't know if that's too much or not. It would help language learners know
when a vowel is shortened, but on the other hand it would probably not be
much more of an advantage for someone with native knowledge of when a vowel
is shortened. Would it cause confusion to see:
|tÿmpï| "money, rock"
|tympin "my money, my rock"
        Very interesting, thanks for taking the time to post it.
        :Peter

        [1] Full disclaimer: Enamyn has silent final vowels that pop up and bite you
later, so I mark them with an accent. Works for me! :)
        [2] I should probably use the circumflex, too, since it's clearer than "í",
but I just can't bring myself to do it. At least not yet.
--
Oh what a tangled web they weave who try a new word to conceive!

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