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

From: "Marcus Smith" <smithma@...>

[me]

> >By the way... has anyone ever tried to apply the Cherokee syllabry to
> >Choctaw or any other aboriginal language of the southeastern US, that is,
> >Muskogean, Caddoan, or what not?  I'd like to see if Choctaw could be
> >written with Sequoyah's glyphs.  But I just don't remember what is and what
> >is not a phoneme in Choctaw.  Anybody?
>
> (As before, this is subject to my memory and possiblly confusion with
> Chickasaw.)
>
> 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>).
> Two nasal consonant phonemes: n m (maybe N, I don't remember)
> Three approximants: y w l
> Stops: b p t k ' (glottal stop can only be word initial or final, they are
> never written)
> Fricatives: f s sh lh h
> One affricate: ch
>
> Any of the consonants can be geminate.
Uh, ixnay on Cherokee script then.  Not for three vowels.  Arabic maybe, but not
Cherokee.

Also (who wrote this?), I should've thought that many national language scripts
are the result of collaberation between natives and "palefaces", and I wouldn't
impose my own standards on anybody else just because it suits me.  At least I'll
try not to.  ;)  Anyway, I was thinking of making Latinate scripts more in
conformity to global standards for the purpose of easing use of computers and
the Internet.

Navajo is fine by me as it is, and Cherokee is too distinctive and beautiful,
though of course a Latin transcription isn't out of the question.  (There are
now some modified transcription schemes that do not use v as a vowel, and also
are more accurate to actual pronunciation, since a lot of Cherokee characters
can have several consonant or vowel values.)  Choctaw also does fine as it is,
but for sake of Latin-1 accomodatability, I'd use acute accents for length and
circumflex accents for nasal (or some kind of setup), and a or o-tilde for the
script V letter, the nasal-schwa thingie.  Or the o-umlaut, or o-slash...

And leave "sh" and "ng" (?) as is, as long as you won't have s+h sequences, and
I don't think that ever happens.  For the surd lateral fricative, maybe use "x"
or something?

DaW.