Re: USAGE: Adapting non-Latin scripts
| From: | Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, May 24, 2006, 13:39 |
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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@...>
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