Re: Slavic Conlangs (was Re: Hello to you all!)

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On Monday 04 March 2002 10:49 am, Bryan Maloney wrote:

> Is the Cyrillic for English available electronically?  This damnable
> Latin alphabet is just far too few letters.
        If you have root access to a *nix system with X, this is a piece of cake. In
my case, I modified the keymap for koi8-ru to something more sensible for an
American keyboard; hence, q = я, w = ш, e = е, r = р, t = т, y = ы, etc. (To
properly view this, you need to set your encoding to koi8-r. In case your
computer has not been Russified, q = ja, w = sh, e = je, r = r, t = t, y =
y.) Most of the Cyrillic alphabet can be mapped to sounds (t = т),
look-alikes (q = я, w = ш), or transliterations (y = ы). For the few cases
where this does not work, near equivalents are used. For instance, щ (shch)
is mapped to "2", since it is near "w", and э (e) is mapped to "3", since it
is near "e".
        With that in mind, we can start to construct a Cyrillic script for English.
Part of the problem is what faces every spelling reform: do we try to emulate
the Latin script as much as possible, or do we go for phonetic
representation? In the former case, it's pretty simple: "th" is "тх", "sh" is
"сх", etc. But it seems a shame to let a perfectly good ш go to waste, so
perhaps "sh" should be ш and "ch" should be ч. "w" could be represented as in
Russian, as an initial у followed by a vowel. Hence, "water" would be уатер,
and "winter" would be уинтер.
        If, however, we wanted to take the phonetic route, we would be in for a
world of pain with dialect variations. (This is why all spelling reforms in
recent memory have failed.) But I'll ignore that and map my own dialect.
Russian Cyrillic has ten vowel "letters" (а, я, э, е, ы, и, о, е (this should
be jo), у, ю) and since English doesn't need the soft and hard signs (ь and
ъ), we can use those as vowels, too. That gives us twelve to work with, which
isn't so bad. Fortunately, I distinguish only ten vowels Thus, I would map
the vowels like this:
/i/ = и
/I/ = ы
/e/ = е
/E/ = э
/&/ = я
/a/ = а
/@/ = ь
/o/ = о
/u/ = у
/U/ = ю (I'm to lazy to look this one up - vowel in "book")

Note: I do not differentiate /O/, /V/, or /A/. "cot" and "caught" are the
same for me, having the same vowel (/a/) as "father" and "hot" (no back /A/
for me). /V/ is the same as /@/ for me.

Consonants are a little trickier. p, b, t, d, k, g, f, v, s, z, /S/, /Z/, h,
ch, m, n, l, r, and /j/ can be as in Russian, no problem. That leaves /T/,
/D/, /dZ/, /N/, and /w/. Glancing at Serbian, I see that it uses a character
similar to ц (ts) for /dZ/, but we might as well use ц, rather than the
Serbian variation. We can also take the "нь" symbol from Serbian for /N/
(it's one letter in Serbian). Serbian also has two signs that look like a
combination of "т" with either and "h" attached or a "b" attached, which
could be used to represent /T/ and /D/ respectively. /w/ could be represented
by щ, but that's sign symbolism, and not very neat. There's still a couple of
signs left over in standard Russian Cyrillic, but for some reason I'm quite
smitten with the Abkhaz voiced velar frictive sign: a г with a loop (see
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/abkhaz.htm, top row, fourth from the right).
But that's because it just looks funky. Other suggestions welcome. :)
        :Peter
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