Re: mu for [N] (was: Koryak Vowel harmony)

If you don't like the use of digits or consonants to indicate tones and you
experience difficulties in placing diacritics on some characters, perhaps
you could consider the way Lisu writes its tones: with punctuation marks.
==> http://www.omniglot.com/writing/fraser.htm

Jean-François


On Friday, January 21, 2005 1:32 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> writes:
>> On Jan 21, 2005, at 1:02 AM, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>> >> Any good suggestion for a voiceless pharyngeal fricative? :-)
>> > [In ISO-8859-1]
>>
>> > How about |¿|?  It makes more sense for the voiced one than the
>> > voiceless one, given the IPA, but if you don't have the voiceless one,
>> > it
>> > seems fairly reasonable.  I think |£| and |þ| both bear a slight
>> > resemblance
>> > to the IPA barred-h.  Using |¼| is probably too weird, but maybe |×|
>> > (due to its similarity to |x| or ³ (similar to Arabic 'ayin)) . ..
>> > -Marcos
>>
>> Noooooo, you can't represent _Haa_/_hhet_ using a _`ay(i)n_-looking
>> symbol!!!  That's just *wrong*! :-P
>> I use |hh| myself, usually.
>> |x| could work, if it's not already taken for /x/.
>> If you're not adverse to using numbers, Arabic-speakers commonly use
>> |7| to transliterate it.
>> Other possible symbols:
>> |#| (looks like barred-H)
>> |q| it's back-of-the-mouth-y
>> |j| like Spanish /x/~/X/, just a little more back.
>
> So many suggestions! :-)
>
> First of all, I don't like using non-letter symbols for phonemes
> because I don't like the look of words with symbols.  They have no
> upper case (|µ| also doesn't, hmm...) and they seem to -- hmmm --
> destroy the look of words.  Very subjective thingy, of course.  I even
> do not like apostrophes inside words.
>
> Further, |x|, |q| and |þ| are occupied for /x/, /q/ and /T/, resp.  I
> especially like the look of |qþ|.  It's just a wonderful finding! :-)
> The capital version |Qþ| destroys the niceness a bit, however.
>
> OE lig is indeed interesting, but maybe too weird for /X\/.
>
> I'll experiment with |j|, however, although I keep on mispronouncing
> it.  Same with |y|.
>
> BTW, I use |r| for /X/, borrowing from Kalaallisut, German and French
> (in Greenlandic, it's /R/, but it's not a rhotic as in German for
> French, but phonemically corresponds to fricativized /q/).  I like
> the look of the two clusters |tr| and |qr| with |r|.
>
> Currently unoccupied letters:
>  labials: |b|, |p|, |m|, |f|, |v|, |w|
>  other:   |j|, |l|, |c|, |y|, |z|
>
> More problems: vowels & tones: since the language has tones, which I
> *must* (:-)) represent with diacritics in order to avoid symbols (and
> I don't like letters for tones either), I have problems due to the
> existence of a schwa: there is a nice unicode letter for it, but my
> browser fails to compose schwas with acute or grave accent.  So I
> used |e|.  However, uvulars and pharyngeals shift the articulation
> of /i/ to [e], and I want to represent this orthographically, too.
> *Sigh*
>
> Maybe I should get a new Linux distro, new browsers, everything new
> for my Laptop.  I just don't exactly feel like a sysadmin right
> now. :-/
>
> **Henrik
>
> BTW: My Lisp grammar can now handle sandhi rule!  Yesterday, I could
>     watch the first magic hybrid phonemes in action.
>     I will probably post some tables soon.
>
>