Re: Futurese

Javier wrote:
> >>Can you suggest an alternative letter assignment which
> >>doesn't introduce diacritics nor additional letters
> >>nor leaves any letter unused?
> >
> >Well, your scheme had exactly one 26 phones to distribute among the 26
> >letters of the Roman alphabet. That'd mean 26! possible arrangements.
>
>I meant, can you suggest an alternative letter assignment
>that "makes sense", i.e. that doesn't arbitrarily
>assign /b/ to <g> or /u/ to <e>?
Well, most of your phoneme-grapheme pairings are of course pretty
unchallengeable - |k|=[k], |p|=[p] etc.

What'll cause problems are [S Z N j @], for which we're left with |c j q x
y|, so there's not too much room for inovation (and yes I know you already
know all this). The only change among the use of these, under the conditions
you've imposed, I'd see as an improvement is switching |x| and |c|. |c|=[Z]
is about as justified as |x|=[Z] - Turkish has |c|=[dZ] (Turkish has alot
more speakers than Albanian of course, but that wasn't supposed to be a
factor). |x|=[S] has some precedence, of course.

If you were to shift /S/ and /Z/ back to velar position (ie to [x] and [G]),
writing |x| and |c| would be nicely justified by the modern values of the
corresponding Greek letters chi and gamma! (But of course, changing the
phonology to achieve this kind of orhtographic neatness would be pretty
weird.)

[snip somewhat legalistic clear-makings]

>Yes, you made yourself very clear now. I hope I've
>managed to make myself equally clear too.
Yes. Thank you.

                                                    Andreas

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.