Re: many and varied questions

Etak wrote:
>
> Hello!
>    I have a few questions that I'm hoping someone can
> answer.
>    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.
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.

>    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?
If they're allophones, then there should be no problem.  I don't usually
bother transcribing allophones differently in Uatakassi, but if I did,
it'd only require more discussion on how to romanize.  For that matter,
transcribing *to* the con-syllabry would require no explanation.  Just
say "s and z are written the same way".  You'd only need to explain the
rules when transcribing *from* your syllabry.

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> 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.
But those are both recent (post-1946), and phonetically different from
the big kana.  KIYO is /kijo/, KIyo is /kjo/.

>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
Uatakassi does something similar, but more like quotation marks, little
squiggles that mark the beginning and end of a name.

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