Re: Deseret alphabet

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tristan McLeay" <kesuari@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 6:19 PM
Subject: Re: Deseret alphabet


> Raen-Fransua Colsunu ?raet:
>
> > Thank yall for your answers.
>
> There's only one of me. And when pluralised, I take 'youse', not 'yall' :)
Yall here means you (Tristan McLeay), <Wilhelm Ulrich Schlaier> and Tim May.

>
> > 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).
>
> Short/long can be solved with doubling of vowels or consonants (using w
> or y as the sixth);
That's what I did at the beginning (I used and still use y as the sixth) but
there's a problem with a suffixed vowel: /ka:/ is not the same as /ka?a/. I
could add a letter for the glottal stop, but all are already used except l.
I could use the apostrophe, but that would visually "break" the word.

> nasalisation can use a following nasal consonant (if
> one can be unambiguous)
Impossible: /a/, /a~/, /an/, /a~n/, /am/, /a~m/, /aN/ and /a~N/ are 8
different things.

> or a tilde above. (And you'd have to do
> something with Deseret for the nasals, anyway.)
For the Latin alphabet, I tried a macron for the long vowels and a tilde for
the nasal ones, but with most fonts those 2 diacritics are at the same
height (I think OpenType fonts don't solve the problem).
I tried a combining macron below but with the letter i, the macron was on
the left.

Finally I made the following choice:

* In Unicode:
  - short oral (= not nasal, is that correct) vowels: nothing above (a)
  - long oral vowels: acute above, a la Hungarian (á)
  - short nasal vowels: grave above (à)
  - long nasal vowels: acute and grave, i.e. circumflex above (â)

* In ASCII:
  - short oral vowels: the letter alone (a)
  - long oral vowels: the letter with a following h*, a la German (ah)
  - short nasal vowels: c after (ac)
  - long nasal vowels: hc after (ahc)

(*) That's not ideal since h is already used to make unvoiced nasal
consonants, but ASCII is NOT ideal, is it?

For the Deseret alphabet, I use a useless letter as a nasaliser.

>
> > 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).
>
> I guess it is always up to you :)
What does that mean, it is up to me?

>
> > 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...
>
> Ah, well, for your information, the standard pronunciation I'd expect is
> something resembling /wUm@n/.
That's what my dictionaries say, but as I wrote above I DON'T live in an
English speaking country, English is NOT my native language and I DON'T
speak it every day.

>
> > Thus the single letter "short o" should be used for [V], [@] and [3:]?
> > Interesting! I'll decode some texts to see how that works.
I began to decode some texts. One is already available there:
http://users.belgacom.net/bn130627/deseret.html. What intrigues me the most
(Ce qui m'intrigue le plus) is the use of /A:/ as an indifinete article.

Jean-François
jfcolson@belgacom.net

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