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

>From: Danny Wier <dawier@...>
>As I watch my Astros prepare to beat the Braves (Rocker sux), Kristian
>wrote:
P.S. Astros load the bases, winning run on second, one out... Braves
double-play.  We lose again dammit.

>>I was just surfing the web and found a site that claims to have
>>fonts for the whole world:
>>
>>http://www.linguistsoftware.com/language.htm
Okay.  Now I'll actually comment on the site.  I was particularly interested
in how Native American languages.  Canada is promoting a more-or-less
universal geometric syllabry many of us are familiar with.

In the USA, however, some form of Anglo-Latin script was imposed on various
nations.  And many of these systems are pretty half-assed.  And they involve
some weird diacritical conventions.  Well these alphabets came from
missionaries, rather than linguists.

Cherokee of course is one of the very few exceptions -- probably the lone
exception among the most important Native American languages, it being a
clever syllabry (and considering that Sequoyah was illiterate, the feat was
quite amazing, he invented literacy for himself!).

As for me, I am Choctaw on dad's side.  So naturally I looked at how it was
written first of all (from that website).  I remember that nasal vowels are
marked with an underscore, and overlines mark long vowels (I think).  A
"schwa"-like neutral vowel is marked with a form of IPA upsilon.  The
language structure is most often CV, -Vh is used a lot, there is a voiceless
nasal fricative _hl_ which corresponds to Welsh _ll_ and Navajo _l-diagonal
stroke_.

But I saw acute accents, an a-circumflex (no other vowels are circumflexed),
and breve vowels.  The breve vowels are probably ultrashort or laxed, but I
don't think the Muskogean languages are tonal, so I can't explain the acute
accents, unless it marks a strong accent in a syllable not normally stressed
(like Spanish).

Choctaw is at least pretty settled and well-structured as a written
language, even though using an underline as a nasal vowel marker is not a
globally-accepted convention.  Najavo is even better, since acute accent
marks high pitch, ogonek (à la Polish and Old Lithuanian) marks nasal
vowels, and apostrophes mark ejective stops and affricates.

But other languages -- particularly Athabaskan and Salishan, which have
unusually large consonant inventories -- do some weird things.  I saw K's
and G's with slashes like Danish Ø, underlined letters, umlauts on
consonants, and even non-alphabetic marks like ampersand, dollar and cent
sign, at sign, percent!  (This makes me think of Poliespo where the
language's infamous inventor used diacritics and unusual conventions like he
was trying to set some record.)

So my question is -- and this is concerning natlangs, but I have bitched
about Klingon's case-sensitive transliteration system a few times -- what
has been done to improve and conventionalize Latinate Native American
scripts?  (And for one thing, I can't get passed the use of the letter V as
a vowel in transcribed Cherokee; I'd rather use o-tilde or even the at-sign
something like that to let me know it's a neutral nasal vowel.)

So I relinquish the floor for comments.

DaW.
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