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

Daniel Andreason wrote:

>Yeah. The sentence "chim iti tvpa micha chi tvbi vt sv hopulhvli hoka"
>was a real chore until I realized that the v's were vowels. :)
My Chickasaw teacher taught us "Amazing Grace" in Choctaw.  Before I had ever
read any of the language, I had the read from the Choctaw hymnal.  It took a
couple tries before anybody had figured out the pronunciation.

That sentence shows a lot of the problems with the original Choctaw
orthography.  All the inflections are written as separate words, long vowels
and consonants aren't marked.  There should actually only be five words there:

chimiti [probably with double t] tvpa micha [that's two morphemes, don't know
why they weren't separated like the rest] chitvbivt [the first <i> should
either be followed by <n> or be nasalized (non-phonemic distinction); probably
needs a glottal stop between <iv>] svhopulhvlihoka.

>> Three vowels: a, i, o. Each one can be phonemically short, long or
>> nasal. (Schwa is short a, written with upsilon; long i is sometimes
>> written with <e>).
>
>I read in Pam Munro's article that traditionally short o's often were
>represented by <u>.
Ah yes.  I had forgotten about that.

Marcus

P.S.  How were the talks by Mithun and Corbett?