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

>From: Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
>Subject: Re: Is Microsoft conquering the world?! (Re: Orthographies with
>           lotsa diacritics)
>Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 17:05:15 -0700
>
>Danny Wier wrote:
>
> >>I was just surfing the web and found a site that claims to have
> >>fonts for the whole world:
>
>None of the Zapotecan languages are listed there.  And if any language
>family
>needs its own font, its Zapotec.  They have to have all kinds of crazy
>diacritics to represent their vowels, and IIRC the consonants are so
>straightforward either.
You should write them then and inform.  Those are Native American languages
as well, just in a different part of America.  And of course there's South
America with Quechua, Aymara, Tupi, Guarani...

> >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).
>
>My knowledge of Choctaw is sketchy.  Most of it I have picked up during my
>study of Chickasaw (which until recently was considered a dialect of
>Choctaw).
>(This is my disclaimer - caveat lector)
That's right.  Choctaw and Chickasaw are like Serbian and Croatian, which I
mentioned.  Or maybe Danish and one of the two Norwegians, I forget which
one is more like Danish...  Anyway, they're highly mutually intellegible,
divided only by politics.

>Macrons ("overlines" as you called them) are generally used to show a
>lengthened vowel.  These are vowels that are phonemically short, but are
>lengthened under the right phonological conditions.  This is just a way to
>show
>pronunciation better, and isn't a standard part of the orthography.  I've
>never
>seen it in published text.
Yeah, I've only seen a few published examples of Choctaw.  I plan on taking
a trip to Oklahoma, with proofs in hand incluiding a receipt paid to my
great-grandfather from the state of Mississippi in the amount of one hundred
dollars for reimbursement for Indian lands taken by White settlement, and
becoming an enrolled member in the Choctaw nation.  Then I'll look at some
documents and get a feel for the look and sound of the language.  I should
learn a fair amount of Choctaw as well, along with Irish Gaelic since both
are ancestral languages (also on dad's side).

>You have to be careful of <hl>, because it can represent the sequence <h> +
><l>
>or the lateral fricative.
Hmmm... they might underline h and l together if they represent one phoneme.
  But I can't remember since I only studied the language very superficially
six years ago.

>It's also a relatively recent one.  A lot of older texts (and some not
>so-old)
>use a superscript <n> to mark nasalization, and one recent book used a plan
><n>.  That was a bad idea because nasal vowels and vowel + <n> are
>definitely
>distinct.
I've seen other Amerindian languages using superscript n for the nasal as
well.  They were listed in that website.  I'd prefer using a tilde as
Portuguese does.  But even an underline is better than an ambiguous use of
n.

>(And for one thing, I can't get passed the use of the letter V as
> >a vowel in transcribed Cherokee
>
>Choctaw used to do this as well, but it has been conventionalized as the
>upsilon you noted above.  Apparently you aren't the only one to dislike it.
>:-)
I'd expect that.  But at least Choctaw changed the form to that of a
distinct letter and not leaving it like the V.  (I don't think /v/ is found
in Choctaw either.)

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?

DaW.

>Marcus
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