Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey

2005-4-7 i, {Carsten}-ram {Becker}-sqam tu-i kriq-zox:

> On Wednesday 06 April 2005 21:45 CEST, Patrick Littell
> wrote:
>  > One thought: I've been learning Tzeltal, a Mayan language
>  > of Chiapas, and the wonderful manual I've been reading
>  > uses a somewhat different, slightly simpler orthography
>  > than other works, or the "official" orthography if there
>  > is one.  In it, multi-morpheme words are often broken up
>  > and it's pretended that they're separate, independent
>  > words.
> That'd be a possibility, putting mid-dots or hyphens in
> between, if not even spaces. Though usually, two same
> sounds are reduced to one, with vowels getting an acute
> accent. The combination is not necessarily pronounced
> differently.
The phonetic mutations at morpheme boundaries would complicate
things slightly, I guess, but hyphens or dots would still
probably help children and foreigners learning to read an
agglutinative language.  A few Esperanto textbooks and readers
have (or used to have) apostrophes or hyphens in compound words
(though not, I think, at every morpheme boundary: e.g.
mar'bestojn rather than mar'best'o'j'n).

In my orthography for gjax-zym-byn, I use hyphens at all morpheme
boundaries which are also syllable boundaries (as in the language
name two lines above, e.g.; but not in postpositions like "vin",
v+i+n, "touching the front of").  This feature of the orthography was
originally intended as "training wheels" for my use while developing
the language and learning it, but after seven years, though
I'm reasonably fluent in the written language, I still haven't
dropped the hyphens.  Maybe it's time to drop them for a few weeks,
then look back and see if my diary entries in that period are
significantly harder to read than the earlier ones that use hyphens.

-- Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm