Re: many and varied questions

Quoting Etak <tarnagona@...>:

> Hello!
>    I have a few questions that I'm hoping someone can
> answer.
By happy coincidence, I've got some answers waiting for questions! :)

>    Firstly, I'm inventing a syllabery for my conlang,
> and I've run into a couple of problems.  The
> romanization of my conlang has capitals, but my
> syllabery doesn't.  Does anyone have any suggestions
> as to how to form capitals, preferably without using
> bigger letterforms because my letters are already kind
> of big.
I assume you're aware that most scripts don't have anything corresponding to
the upper/lower case distinction of Latin, Cyrillic and Greek? I'm not aware
of anything like it in any syllabary, altho Japanese uses small versions of
kana in digraphs.

Outside of German, capitals are essentially used for drawing extra attention
to the beginning of sentences and to names. The former might be replaced with
an explicit sentence start indicator - like Spanish's inverted question mark
before questions, only for all sentences. Of course, you might use special
ones to indicate sentences which are questions, exclamations, or contain the
word for red wine with too much cinnamon. For the later, one possibility would
be to go all Egyptian and draw little boxes 'round the names, or you could
have a special name starter symbol - I belive Ray once suggested we should use
the asterisk for this in Latin while ditching uppercase. Incidentally, this
suggest a way of insulting people in writing - place _two_ asterisks 'fore
their name, suggesting they're errors.

Or you could simply leave both unmarked. Historically, that's what most
scripts do.

>    Another thing I'm wondering about is that my
> Romanization has different letters for 't' and 'd',
> 's' and 'z', and the other plosives and fricatives in
> my language, but the native syllabery doesn't because
> plosives and fricatives can only be voiceless at the
> beginning of words and so are automatically read that
> way.  My question, do you think this will make
> transliterating stuff into my syllabery overly
> difficult and/or confusing?
They do essentially the same in the commonest romanization of Korean (the one
that spells 'Hangul' rather than the 'Hankul' one phonemically might have
expected), and it doesn't seem to be creating any problems.

What I'd do, unless I felt particularly evil, would be to create
one 'scientific' transliteration which does not uphold any distinctions not
made in the native script, and an 'everyday' transliteration for quoting names
in an English context or the like.

(If I were being particularly evil, I'd create two scientific ones and 3.272
everydady ones, and at least one of the later would make automatic
reconstruction of the native spelling impossible.)

>    Also, what verbal mood is the English word 'might'?
>  I've been translating the Babel text, and translated
> 'lest' as 'because we might' but than realized that I
> needed a new verbal mood and didn't know what it was
> called.
Historically, I seem to recall, it's the subjunctive of 'may'.

                                                  Andreas