Re: USAGE: Adapting non-Latin scripts

You're setting the Reply-To header with your googlemail account, which
makes it hard to reply to the mailing list. A better way of doing it
is to set up a new identity --- then, your From address appears as
abrigon@gci.net (or whatever). So I'm sending this from a Google Mail
account, but my email address appears as "conlang@tristan.id.au", but
replies are directed to the list. You can do it from the "Accounts"
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On 15/07/06, Abrigon <abrigon@...> wrote:

> Yes, the SH sound, and how it is spelled, changing it would be a
> major change.. Leaving the French spelling behind and spell them
> closer to how they are spoken would be a major plus.
SH isn't all that bad. It's things like "ough" or "sugar" or all the
myriad ways to spell /@/ that make our language hard to spell!

> But major thing still is, is the Latin Characters all that good
> for any language? IPA yes seems to be alot better adaptation of
> the Latin Alphabet for a wider ranger of languages, but how do
> you do cursive in it?
Well, when you say "Latin Characters", what do you mean?
ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZ (i.e., no J, U or W)? Well then, that's
obviously somewhat limiting, but was adequate for an earlier form of
Latin (forfeiting denoting vowel length distictions for some reason,
but they did double consonants for consonant length
distinctions---anyone know why?). But if you mean the whole of the
alphabet, only Cyrillic seems to be as flexible. Most other alphabets
don't have ways to write exotic vowels like [2] or [7] or can't write
complex syllable structures in simple ways or are great for some
language families but appalling for more others. Through use the Latin
and Cyrillic alphabets seem to have acquired many options for
extending themselves to novel environments, including through outright
novel forms (e.g. ramshorns), borrowing letters from other scripts
(thorn, gamma), diacritics, digraphs, ligatures, all sorts.

As for using some of the IPA extensions in a regular alphabet, sure,
some characters are hard to distinguish in handwriting (like u and
upsilon/bucket, normal and small cap i, or normal and fishhook r, or
normal and script a, and probably in quick writing gamma and the
ramshorns). But in practice you could still use them, albeit a bit
differently. I doubt any language uses /e/ and /E/ and /&/ and /a/ and
/A/, so you could just shuffle them around a bit.

Probably it's usually easier to just go the traditional route and add
diacritics to letters tho, like a diaerisis or a caron or a slash or
whatever.

> English an easy language to learn, but hard to learn how to
> spell it?
More likely read it, for EFL learners. One common way for non-native
speakers to say something incomprehensibly is when they say a word the
way it's spelt (either according to their native language's rules,
English "rules", or some combination thereof). (If it's your native
language, all languages are equally easy to learn, so the first half
of that sentence is meaningless. Of course, it's still somewhat
difficult to learn to spell...)

--
Tristan.

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