Re: A little help with Cyrillic

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Clark <pc451@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 12:57 AM
Subject: A little help with Cyrillic


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>         I am in the process of writing some documention on my language,
and need to
> mention how it is written in Cyrillic letters. I'm stuck, however, on two
> sounds: /K/ (voiceless alveolar lateral fricative) and /T/. Someone
mentioned
> (Frank Valoczy?) that /T/ is written with a Cyrillic "s" and a cedilia or
> something. Please confirm/clarify/correct.
Confirm.

> As for /K/, the only language I
> know that is written in Cyrillic that has this sound is Chukchi, but that
> just uses the Cyrillic "l". Well, Enamyn also has /l/, so that won't
work.

The problem is that some langs with Cyr script use digraphs, and not
special letters. You see, there's no "standard" correspondence between Cyr
letters and sounds they denote. Just as the Latin letters! To read smth
correctly you need to know spelling rules! Even if the langs are closely
related, but have long history of writing.
Cf.: Letter Ghe in Russian (Ru.) stands for [g], but in Ukrainian (Uk.) it
is for [h\];
Letter Ie: Ru [je]+allophones -- Uk. [E]+allophones, but for the previous
one Uk. uses #1108 etc. etc.

So, IIRC (because I quote from memory) Mordovian uses El Kha digraph for
[K]. Caucassian alphabets are the most intriguing because the only
additional letter they use is Palochka (like Latin I), and represent
everything by digraphs and trigraphs. I don't remember exactly how they
represent [K] but it may be El Kha Palochka (check Ingush phonology at
http://ingush.narod.ru/), El Palochka or El Hard-Sign.

> You could probably respond off-list. Thanks,
>         :Peter
Yitzik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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