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

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Thursday, December 20, 2001, 19:47
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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Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>