Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey

Hi!

Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...> writes:
> And the letter for -Vi or -Vy is always written to the *left* of a
> consonant, not to the right, although the system is other wise
> strictly left-to-right[1].
WAAAH!  Noooo!!!111111  Please!!!  Don't change that!  I *love* it!

I really do love this nice thingy on the left.  It's great, it's life,
it's beautiful, it's elegant how the base character gets surrounded by
the vowels.  It's so nice!  Please don't change it!  <%-o

> That certainly mixes up beginners very much.
I consider it a minor issue: learning to read/write does not take very
long compared to usage of the script during a lifetime, especially
since it's an abudiga and no moster script taking years to learn.
Therefore, niceness is a more important issue, I think.

Again, *please* don't change the -Vi/-Vy.  Please, please,
please don't!  Please, Carsten, don't! :-)

> On Thursday 07 April 2005 21:11 CEST, Roger Mills wrote:
>
>  > (Most of our conlangs, Ayeri included I think, also boast
>  > orthographies with near one-to-one correspondence.
>  > Maggel excluded...)
>
> Well, at least the romanisation of it. The writing system I
> recently came up with for example usually does not indicate
> |a|'s respectively the lack of them.
If you intend to add a few dots for children, left out by adults, this
would fix it, no?  I feel it's quite natural as it is.  Are
you thinking of a virama?

> First, you have to know where there is an <a> and
> where not, so you need to learn the look of words and then,
> you also need to understand the context to interpret them
> right. A primer would of course have either all a's
> indicated or use the virama very much until a certain
> level.
>
> The writing system is not completely phonetic because they'd
> write for example _Añ sil·vyin ayon:ris·_ instead of "Ang
> silvayin ayonáris". Leave out the raised dots for adults.
Ah, ok.  I'd use a virama to make it look natural, so you get an
abugida -- scripts of this type look like abugidas.  With a dotted a,
it'd be very close to an alphabet.

> [1] This raises a question: The Proto-Semitics, were they
> mostly left-handed, or why are semitic languages written
> from right to left? It would be more natural for a
> left-handed person. I guess left-to-right became the
> standard direction in Europe because most people are right
> handed and writing is easier for them that way.
I thought about this as well, especially when considering
how some left-handed pupils turned their sheet by up to almost
90 degrees to actually be able to *see* what they had written.

I doubt it, though.  Righthandedness is not what I expect to be
culturally different too much, but rather I'd expect a universal
distribution.

**Henrik