Re: I'd the oddest dream last night.

From: "Eamon Graham" <robertg@...>

> Yeah, in fact Dutch and Scandinavian inspired me to suggest that a
> couple years ago for a Gaelic-based conlang I was working on - but I
> could never reconcile myself to those final -sj, -dj, -tj, etc.  A
> problem I have when I create orthographies is walking the fine line
> between phonology and etymology and the line between ease and
> aesthetics.
You got the same problem with languages with word-final labialized
consonants. Like the Cushitic language Iraqw /irak_>_w/, implied within the
name. You either have that convention, of word- and syllable-final Cw,
or -auc, which represents word- and syllable-final /ak_w/ in Nahuatl. The
most creative inventions, IMO, are the soft and hard signs of Old Church
Slavonic.

Then there's Old Irish, and here we are again.

> When I was a kid I created a Czech-inspired orthography for Gaelic,
> but now I guess that doesn't really make sense: new keyboards, no
> tradition of using carons in Celtic languages.  Once I even played
> around with a Turkish-Romanian inspired orthography (I was 12 and I
> liked really exotic orthographies!) but I have the same problem with
> cedilles as I would with Carons.
I'd suggest acute accents for palatized ("slender") consonants myself --
easier to write. Cedillas to me are slightly nicer than a dot beneath a
consonant, indicating a "hard" value (Dravidian and Indo-Aryan retroflexes,
Semitic emphatics, uvulars and pharyngeals, etc.)

> Oh well... back to the drawing board.
I broke my drawing board back in 1989...