Re: Q & X

On Mon, 8 Jan 2001 23:50:51 +0200, Tero Vilkesalo
<teronpostilaatikko@...> wrote:

>And now to a real question. Which sounds do you write with the letter Q or X
>in your a priori conlangs with Latin alphabet? What different sounds do they
>reflect in those languages of the world that use Latin alphabet? (What is Q
>in Greenlandic???)
I sometimes use q and x for the sounds written [q] and [x] in IPA. But I
use "x" for a variety of different sounds. In Zirienka (well, in the
romanized transcription of Zirienka, which has its own alphabet), it
represents the same sound as Chinese "x" in Pinyin spelling, a kind of
palatalized "sh" sound. It's a soft z-like sound in Olaetian (technically a
voiced laminal alveolar fricative, pronounced with the blade of the tongue
instead of the tip). Tilya uses it for [S]. I actually did use it for [ks]
in a couple of older languages.

In Zharranh, "q" represents a phoneme that's pronounced [kw] or [p],
depending on context. (It was probably a labio-velar stop in an ancestral
form of the language.) It represents [tS] in Tilya. I use it for [N] in a
couple of languages, since "ng" can be ambiguous. In fact, my new language
Czirehlat (a variant of Tirehlat) will probably end up using "q" for [N].
For completeness, I'll mention Ludireo, even though it's not an a priori
language: it uses "q" for the voiced velar fricative ([G] in SAMPA, [Q] in
Kirshenbaum).

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