Re: Deseret alphabet

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tristan McLeay" <kesuari@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 5:53 AM
Subject: Re: Deseret alphabet


Thank yall for your answers.


> Raen-Fransua Colsunu ƿraet:
I don't know what's that transcription and how you pronounce it, but for
your information I pronounce my name /ZA~frA~swa kOlso~/.

>
> > My interest is now on the Deseret alphabet and how I could adapt it to
write
> > a conlang.
>
> If you aren't going to use an established orthography (like Roman,
> Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian, Chinese, Japanese, Tolkien's), I'd suggest
> creating your own. Ones like Roman and Cyrillic, which have already been
> adapted to plenty of languages, are probably your best bet.
The Latin alphabet would not be my best bet because my language has 4*6 = 24
vowels (6 short and 6 long and each can be nasalized).
Tengwar is not what I need since I have only 3 series of consonants... but I
could keep the 4th series for the initial vowels. Yes I know that's not
Tolkien's use, but IRL many letters of many alphabets are used differently
from a language to another.

I did create my own script, but as some natlangs are written with different
scripts following the dialects or the period (the Latin and Cyrillic
alphabets for Serbo-Croatian now considered two separate languages for
political reasons, the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets and the UCAS for
Inuktitut, The Arabic and Latin alphabets for Turkish, The traditional and
modern logograms in Chinese, etc.) I wish to use both my script and the
Deseret alphabet, and of course 2 Latin transliterations (one with only
ASCII characters for e-mail and one with diacritics for the Web).

>
> Deseret probably wouldn't look the same if anyone really changed to use
> it---pairs of letters like long ah and long o are just *dying* to be
> confused. (Not to mention that it's just plain ugly :P )
What's ugly in it? It's just different and uncommon, i.e. ideal for a
conlang.

>
> On the subject of this, has anyone made a conlang that uses Kanji?
>
> > I’ve got no problem with the consonants, but the vowels are not really
> > self-evident.
>
> Of course they aren't. They're talking about a different dialect of
> English. (The only alternative orthography that'd work for English as a
> whole is something like Regularized Inglish, which doesn't even try to
> be phonemic.)
How would it be possible to be phonemic without having a different spelling
for every dialect?

>
> > How is pronounced the letter short o (o as in woman)? Following my
> > dictionaries "woman" is pronounced <"wUm@n> (its "o" is pronounced like
the
> > "oo" of "book"), but I guess the short o and the short oo are used for
> > different vowels. How is "woman" pronounced in the States?
>
> M-W.com lists \wum&n\, \wOm&n\ and \w&m&n\. Presumably \w&m&n\, i.e.
> {/w@m@n/ /wVm@n/ /wVmVn/}, is intended. (In at least one common
> analysis---or even pronunciation---of Std Americian, the vowels of About
> and cUt are just allophones.)
For your information I tend to say [wom{n] myself but since I don't live in
an English speaking country and English is not my mother tongue...

>
> > And finally, how can I write the sounds [I@], [e@], [U@], [V], [3:] and
[@]
> > using only the Deseret alphabet?
>
> Going by my guess above, /V/, /@/ and /3:/ would be spelt as short o,*
> short o or short o + er (because you speak a non-rhotic dialect but
> Deseret is American),
> and short o+er, respectively.
Thus the single letter "short o" should be used for [V], [@] and [3:]?
Interesting! I'll decode some texts to see how that works.

> The centralising
> diphthongs would probably be spelt as the corresponding long vowel + er,
> as in standard English. Deseret is designed for American English, which
> is rhotic.
>
> * What you and I think of as short o is here obviously short ah.
OK.

>
> A note on your SAMPA transcriptions:
> Text in between <angle brackets> refers to the orthography. Text in
> between /slashes/ refers to the phonemic pronunciation. Text in between
> [square brackets] refers to the phonetic pronunciation. So you're
<your>... I'm not '<"wUm@n>'        ;-)

> '<"wUm@n>' above probably should've been /"wUm@n/,
That's a typo. In fact what I meant is ["wUm@n].
BTW what does a text in between \back slashes\ mean (see above)?

> and you'll probably
> find your vowel pronunciations were phonemic too (I think most dialects
> don't use [3:] for /3:/ but rather something either rounded or exactly
> like [@] only longer).
>
> --
> Tristan                  <kesuari@...>
>
Jean-François
jfcolson@belgacom.net

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