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Re: many and varied questions

From:Jeff Jones <jeffsjones@...>
Date:Saturday, April 10, 2004, 9:55
On Wed, 7 Apr 2004 13:01:44 -0400, Etak <tarnagona@...> wrote:
>Hello!
Hello, I don't have much to say that hasn't already been said in other replies, but I have a few remarks ...
> 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.
In my syllabary for 'Yemls, I don't have capitals, although I have symbols that _look_ like capitals, but represent distinct syllables.
> 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?
I'm glad you brought this up. One of my long-standing problems with 'Yemls is romanisation. Despite being ASCII-friendly, the syllabary is hard to read -- even Christophe Grandsire, the inventor of Maggel, said so, and he should know! So I've wanted to come up with something to indicate pronounciation without having to resort to a narrow phonetic transcription in X-SAMPA (which is also hard to read). Anyways, I think I've more or less settled on something after reading the replies to your question.
> 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.
Pinning down the specific moods is another one of my long- standing problems. Besides the indicative forms, I have one other mood marker which is quite overloaded as to its usages. I think "might" indicates possibility, and "lest" that avoiding the possibility is desirable.
> Thank you all for the many and varied answers to my >many and varied questions which I hope to receive. :) >---Etak
Thanks for the questions. Jeff