Re: Is Microsoft conquering the world?! (Re: Orthographies with lotsa diacritics)

Danny Wier wrote:

>I see a pattern here.  Let's set aside the nasals and the v-vowel thing.  You
>have three long and three short, and they form a rough triangle.  Farsi does
the
>same thing with Arabic loans.  Arabic short vowels (i a u) become Farsi /e/
/æ/
>(that should be ash) /o/, while long (i a u) become /i/ /å/ (that should be
>inverted script a; I just cheated and used a-ring) /u/.
>
>So using <i> for long <e> and <u> for long <o>, or vice versa if more
>appropriate, would work for Choctaw and Chickasaw, while <aa> would be
easiest
>for long <a> (or a-circumflex, or a-ring).
If we keep upsilon (I'll use <v> here) for schwa/short a, then we could be
even
more simple and regular.

<e> = /i:/
<i> = /i/
<a> = /a:/
<v> = /a/
<o> = /o:/
<u> = /o/

Nasalization could be used with a tilde or (if we don't want to mark irregular
accents, as is often the case now) acute accent over <e, a, o>.

>(By the way, the native word for Choctaw is Chahta, stress on the final a.)
And a glottal stop at the end, which isn't written.  That's Choctaw for the
people, but I think it needs anompa (anvmpa maybe, I'm not sure) 'language,
word' added for the language.  At least that's how Chickasaw does it:
Chahtanompa (with deletion of final <a'> sequence).

The words for the Chickasaw people and language are Chikashsha and
Chikashshanompa'.

Marcus