Re: A little help with Cyrillic

From: "Peter Clark" <pc451@...>

|         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. 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.
| You could probably respond off-list. Thanks,

A great model for extensions in phonology for Cyrillic-script languages is the
group of high-inventory languages known collectively as Caucasian. Your lateral
fricative could be represented, for example, by <L> followed by a hard sign, or
the palochka, which is identical to Latin capital I and indicates "emphatic",
"glottalized" or otherwise altered consonants. It is used almost exclusively in
Caucasian languages other than Abkhaz, which created new letters (and
neat-looking ones at that).

For the interdental fricatives: Russian used to have a letter called _fita_,
which was dropped and replaced with _fe_ in 1918 when four letters were dropped
from the Russian alphabet. The letter _fita_ had the value of /f/, but was
written in Greek loanwords where _theta_ -- /T/ -- existed. The early Russians
interpreted it as /f/ however. But an ultra-conservative usage of _fita_ for /T/
instead of /f/ is an option. The only problem is that the character resembles a
more recent addition to Cyrillic -- O-bar, which is used for the mid front
rounded vowel. _fita_ has a tilde-like curve in its middle line, while O-bar is
a straight line.

Or the C-cedilla used in Bashkir will work. I'm also thinking of a letter that
doesn't quite exist yet: T with a stroke or bar through its middle, using Gamma
with stroke equalling /G/ (gamma) as a model. The voiced version would of course
be Cyrillic D (the trapezoid with legs) with a middle line.

~Danny~

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