Re: Cerebral consonants & transliterarion

Pablo wrote:
>Just a question to the list: are "cerebral" consonants the same
>as retroflex consonants? I encountered the term while reading
>about Sanskrit. Isn't it annoying when someone calls things
>in a different way than you're accustomed to? Why would you
>call something "cerebral" (unless the etimology of the word
>differs from current "brain").
It's (IIRC) a calque off the native term for the sounds, which means
(literally) "produced in the head". It's unfortunate. Anyway, as I understand
it, this term is identical to "retroflex" (though certainly not perferred).

>As for this, I'd like to know if anyone out there tends to use
>retroflex sounds. I'm trying to incorporate them into a lang
>I'm sketching, and I've found there's no "nice" way to transliterate
>them (I'm having retroflex t, d, and n, and I can't use uppercase
>letters -- they're reserved for other uses and I actually hate
>Klingon-like transliteration.) What do you do when this things
>happen?
Many romanizations, as you've probably seen, use subscript dots. On the Mac,
there's a good font (though slightly excentric in key choices), called Jaghbub,
made for romanizing Arabic, but works well for many languages. It has such
characters. If you're restricted to ASCII, digraphs (<dd>, <dh>, maybe <rd> or
<dr> (which, come to think of it, make good sense if you don't have such
clusters already)) or other marks (<d,> <d.> <d'>, etc.) are all you can do.
There's no really efficient method.

ever green
sam