Re: many and varied questions

Etak scripsit:

>    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.
Only four of the 100-odd Real World scripts have case distinctions:
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian.  (Georgian used to have it but
has abandoned it, and ordinary Georgians can no longer read cased
text without special training.)  Its presence in Latin, from which
it spread to the other scripts, is a historical accident not likely
to be repeated elsewhere.

>    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?
Not really.  The Hepburn romanization of Japanese also makes sub-phonemic
distinctions, but this in no way adds to its difficulty; in fact, one
can learn the romanization as a matter of pairing Latin letter-groups
with single syllabograms.

--
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
        --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God"
                John Cowan <jcowan@...>