Re: many and varied questions

Howdy, Etak.

You wrote:

<<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.>>

Is there a reason your orthography needs to have capital letters?   If the 
*only* reason is that the romanization has capital letters, I'd like to suggest 
that your orthography doesn't need them.   However, if you still want capital 
letters (and note: In a syllabary, this'd be tantamount to capitalizing the 
first two letters of a CV- English word, so DAvid instead of David), there are 
more things you can do than making it bigger.   All you need to do is make it 
different.   In Arabic, for example, you have the initial form of a letter form 
if it's the first part of a word.  In one of my languages, Sathir, the first 
letter, if it's an unaspirated stops, has its lower extremities descend below 
the writing line (so, the phoneme /t/ looks rather like a capital pi, and if 
it comes sentence initially, the two legs go down way lower than they usually 
would).   You could also just have a completely different letter form, though 
you'd hope that you'd be able to recognize a relation between the capitals and 
the non.   Also, a revolutionary idea: You could make the character *smaller*. 
  Why not?   The whole point of a capital is to set it off from the rest of 
the text so that you can tell something (e.g., that it's the beginning of the 
sentence, or an proper name, or a noun).   Maybe you could just put a diacritic 
over the first letter (this'd be a punctuation mark which would indicate 
something like "sentence start").   You can do a number of things.

<<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?>>

Quite frankly, you would expect their to be different letters for /s/ and /z/ 
and /t/ and /d/, respectively, in such a situation.   Will it make 
transliterating stuff difficult?   If it wouldn't confuse the people who are supposed to 
be using this syllabary day-to-day, I'd like to suggest that you could learn 
how to do it.   In other words, no.   But notice: Not all languages match up 
one letter to one phoneme.   Take Hebrew, for example.   It's entirely 
predictable whether a stop will be a stop or a fricative in a given word.   Still, 
when a word is a fricative, it has a dot somewhere around the letter.   In Hindi, 
the velar nasal is an allophone of the palatal nasal, but it has its own 
letter, anyway.   I did a similar thing with Zhyler, where there are separate 
letters for /J/, /N/, /x/ and /G/, even though the distribution is 100% 
allophonic, and therefore predictable.   In other words, you can do whatever you want, 
but the reason to do or not do something shouldn't be whether it's confusing, 
since pretty much nothing's going to end up being confusing to people who have 
to use the writing system (after all, we can write with the English 
orthography, can't we?)

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/