Re: Futurese

Andreas Johansson wrote:
(snipa multa)
>One might also
>question your choice |q|=/N/ - it'll be a freakingly small proportion of
the
>potential speakers that'll guess that.
>>
Still, it's more or less reasonable.  (1) |q| is not otherwise used (2) it
solves the problem of using a digraph |ng| or introducing a special symbol
(e.g IPA eng, though I find eng fun to write) (3) it has some connection to
the velar area, and (4) (close but no cigar) it represents /Ng/ in Fijian
orthography (|g| is /N/, as in many Polynesian languages).

A fan letter to old Rev. Hazelwood, who devised Fijian orthography in the
mid 19th C-- Congratulations, sir, you achieved an almost perfect phonemic
(1 sound, 1 symbol) system long before phonemic theory was ever heard of.

Fijian:  p (loan words) /p/;  t, k; b /mb/, d /nd/ q /Ng/; m, n, g /N/; v
/B/, c /D/, w y, s, r, l.. (There is one digraph, however: |dr| [ndr]. A
possible improvement would be to switch q and g, but it's too late now; in
any case |q| corresponds to /gw, kw, Ngw/ in the non-dictionary dialects, so
it's not all that bad.)