Re: Un-neccesary letters (was: Re: New/revised language: Phonology)

Quoting Andrew Chaney <adchaney@...>:

> >> (personally, i've always
> >> felt x was an exceedingly pointless letter but that's just personal
> bias)
>
> But I dont think this reflects negatively on the letter, I think
> English would a lot less interesting without. Losing x would be
> like taking "gh" out of "knight".
Because Phaleran has *gained* phonemes, rather than lost them,
since the times of its ancestor, nonphonemic writing is of a
wholly different nature, since you get all sorts of vowels where
vowels no longer exist.

> ObConlang: If your language has a native alphabet, does it include
> archaic spellings and such like -ough, kn-, etc?
In the writing system that I'm mulling for Phaleran, words are
transcribed by a combination of a syllabary and a phonemic alphabet.
Tlaspi, from which Phaleran descends, was an isolating language with
much stricter rules about syllable structure (no complex onsets; codas
must be homorganic with following consonants, or be a nasal), and much
of this earlier syllable structure is reflected in current Phaleran
writing despite Phaleran's more complex syllable structure.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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