Re: my iconic alphabet

En réponse à Nathan Richardson <nathan000000@...>:

> Howdy all. I just registered for this egroup. Looks
> like it will be fun.
>
Welcome! Sorry for the belated welcome, but I wanted to have time to take a
look at your site before replying :) .

>
> http://www.angelfire.com/folk/nathan000000/alphabet.html
>
> If it's not too much trouble, I would greatly
> appreciate comments or feedback
> (nathan000000@yahoo.com). Thank you for your time!
>
OK, well, the idea is interesting (and has already been tried several times
IIRC :)) ). Your shapes are nicely reminiscent of the Latin alphabet, despite
an a priori start :) . For the problem of the dot for unvoiced consonants, why
not use a character tail instead? What I mean is a little squiggle on the right
of the character, like what people use to connect two letters in connected
handwriting? That would also solve a little inconsistency of your alphabet:
your non-dotted characters are supposed to be the voiced versions of a voiced-
voiceless pair. But your character for unvoiced 'h' has no dot, while the
voiced 'h' does exist. Now I can understand that this character is not very
practical to dot, but if you use this tail as mark of voicelessness, the
problem would be solved.

Also, your assumption about the IPA is wrong: it's not an attempt at listing
all the phones (it's impossible: the acoustic space is a continuum), but all
the sounds that at least one language has *phonemically*. So the IPA *is* an
alphabet of phone*m*es, it's just that it doesn't restrict itself to a single
or a few languages but tries to describe all the phonemes of all the languages
in the world. And even then it's not completely successful in doing that, hence
the need for the numerous diacritics. So it may be complicated, but the
complication is necessary, and any phonetic alphabet needs about the same
amount of characters. If you try to simplify, you'll make mistakes, as you did.

Now, on to some of the mistakes:
- you consider "retroflex" to be among the manners of articulation (stop,
fricative, lateral, etc...). It's incorrect. "Retroflex" is a *place* of
articulation, like "bilabial", "palatal" or "velar". It's between postalveolar
and palatal.
- the affricates "ch" and "j" and the fricatives "sh" and "zh" are *not*
palatal. They are postalveolar. Palatal is the position of for instance the
German fricative "ch" in "ich". It's quite different in sound from the
English "sh". And "r" is not palatal either. It's plain alveolar in British
English, or retroflex (which is I think what you meant). In fact, the "r"
belongs with the glides ("approximants" is the usual term). It's the alveolar
glide in British English, and often the retroflex glide in American English
(please don't start another English pronunciation thread with that. I know the
picture is much more complicated and that I am partly incorrect. I'm just
simplifying for educational purposes. Nathan will learn the complexities soon
enough ;)) ).
- I wouldn't put the affricates as a single manner of articulation. Affricates
are complicated sounds which are best described by specifying the two sounds
they start and end up as. I think you should do the same with your iconic
alphabet (if you want it to be really iconic): use two characters for an
affricate, with a mark indicating that they refer to a single composite sound.
You could mark diphtongues (like "i" in "like" ;)) ) and coarticulations
(sounds with two articulations at the same time) in the same way, and it would
be more iconic than the system you have now.
- I can't agree with your way of describing vowels. It may be valid for your
dialect of English, but it is *not* usable for any other language, and it is
not possible to simply extend it without inventing new shapes. You really need
to learn first what vowels are common phonemes in languages and start from
there.

In the end, you get an alphabet which may be very well done to write English,
but is not readily modifyable to write any other language, and thus defeats
your goal of universality. The idea of iconicity is good, but not followed to
its logical conclusion. In short, you have let your native language get in the
way of the sound analysis. It's quite common, especially since you're a
beginner, but you need to be aware of that and first learn a bit more about
phonetics before working again on this iconic alphabet.

I hope you won't take my comments as an attack. On the contrary, I mean them as
a way for you to improve your iconic alphabet by correcting some of the
mistakes that crept in. The idea in itself is nice, and the current aesthetics
are not bad (they are quite readable for a European person indeed, probably
easier to read than Tengwar :) ).

Anyway, welcome again!

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

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