Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: USAGE: Adapting non-Latin scripts

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 24, 2006, 13:39
On 5/24/06, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
> -----Original Message----- > >From: Michael Adams <abrigon@...> > > > >Is the Latin characters really that good for English?
Nah, not that great. One problem is that English has far more phonemic vowels than Latin, for starters. (It could be worse -- try fitting Arabic to English, for example, with only three vowel signs.)
> >I know for my conlang, it does not fit well, or can be > >okay, but since my conlang is mostly things like > >consonant-vowel combos, then would the latin be better > >or .. soemthing like Sanskrit or what wring form? > > Mostly CV syllables seems an ideal job for something like Devanagari (the Sanskrit > script), or any of the other Indic scripts.
Or an abugida along the lines of Ethiopian? That encodes CV in one sign, but doesn't use the "no diacritic = inherent vowel" principle of Devanagari. Or UCAS, as Paul mentioned.
> I suspect if you had overwhelmingly CV syllables, you might prefer a straight > syllabary like Japanese or UCAS.
I'd call UCAS an abugida rather than a "straight syllabary" -- the forms for syllables with a common consonant but different vowels are obviously related. Cheers, -- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Replies

Michael Adams <abrigon@...>
Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>
Tim May <butsuri@...>