Re: many and varied questions

 --- Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:

> My suggestion: Don't.  :-)  Capitalization is a
> peculiarity of the
> western alphabets.  But, perhaps come up with some
> *different*
> distinction.  Different forms to mark names, say,
> but *all* the
> characters are written that way, as if we wrote
> "ETAK wrote".  Or, like
> kana, one form is used to mark native words, another
> form is used to
> mark foreign words.  A conlang a friend and I once
> worked out together
> (and later reverted to just her) used a native
> syllabary for its own
> native words, and a borrowed *alphabet* to write
> foreign words (which
> Japanese may well be headed towards ...)
> Alternately, you could have
> word-initial, word-medial, and word-final forms,
> like Arabic and some
> other scripts.
In addition to the normal Hangul-style
alphabet/syllabry of Etabnanni (called the
_ETABVENg_), it also had a normal, nearly-phonetic
alphabet for foreign words (the _rabmew_, a
transliteration of 'ETABVENg' in _rabmew_), but for
words in languages normally written right-to-left
(same way as Etabnanni), the native script was used.
(This worked because hardly any languages in the area
were written right-to-left, and not that many words
were borrowed; and an ideographic script was used for
some words already, so they could be looked upon as
simply long ideographs. The usual ideographs were for
words like 'I' or 'then', not 'cat' or 'jump'.)

Etabnanni didn't do capitalisation. In
transliteration, I use capital letters for words
written in the _ETABVENg_ and lowercase letters for
ones in the _rabmew_. Words used in English (etc.)
excepted, except for _ETABVENg_ and _rabmew_. As
you've seen, _Ng_ is used for transliterating the eng
in the _ETABVENg_, and likewise _nG_ in the _rabmew_;
in addition, _R_ is used for lowvowel+/r/ (represented
by a derivative of _D_) in the _rabmew_; _r_ is used
for all other /r/ (represented by a derivative of
_T_). (In ASCII, at least; in Unicode, appropriate
engs are used for _Ng_ and _nG_ and Yr/small cap. R
for _R_.)

Relatedly, though, each character of the _ETABVENg_
would have one of three forms depending on whether it
was in the initial cluster, medial group, or final
cluser of letter of a syllable. There were complicated
rules regarding whether an onset/coda character made
it into the initial/final cluster or in the medial
group; and in addition, syllables of six or more
characters were spread into two squares. Nevertheless,
this could all be done mechanically, so it isn't
represented in any romanisation.

Sometimes when borrowing words into English, I use a
more phonetic transliteration, so that _TAB_ becomes
'Thaff' /Ta_L:f/ (influenced by my pronunciation of
'staff' and English aesthetics; 'Thaaf' may've been
better but such is life). No other word was
extensively used in this transliteration, though.

(Note that the _ETABVENg_ letter for W, which merged
with B or V, can't remember OTTOMH, was re-used in the
_rabmew_ to designate low vowels unless there was a
consonant after it that used to represent a voiced
consonant. The usual transliteration respects this and
uses the historical values as the basis of its
romanisation. Hence, in the _rabmew_ 'rawpmew' and
'rabmew' would spell equivalent words (/ra_Lfme_L/
IIRC), but only the second would be used.

So in short, Etabnanni's scripts and romanisations
were really rather simple, but they succeeded in
rebelling against the one-letter-one-sound rules all
too many conlangs I'd read about at the time had!

...

> But those are both recent (post-1946), and
> phonetically different from
> the big kana.  KIYO is /kijo/, KIyo is /kjo/.
Really? How did they do it before hand? Both as KIYO?
And a big TSU for geminate consonants? How much reform
has Japanese writing gone through?

--
Tristan (not nomail for a week and a half).

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