Re: Deseret alphabet

Raen-Fransua Colsunu ƿraet:

> 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.

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 )

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 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.)

> 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. 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.

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
'<"wUm@n>' above probably should've been /"wUm@n/, 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@...>

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