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

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.

>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)

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.

  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_.
Choctaw actually likes to have heavy syllables, and if there are two light
syllables in a row, it will lengthen the vowel of the second.  There are
rarely
two light syllables in a row in the language.

You have to be careful of <hl>, because it can represent the sequence <h> +
<l>
or the lateral fricative.

>But I saw acute accents, an a-circumflex (no other vowels are circumflexed),
>and breve vowels.  The breve vowels are probably ultrashort or laxed,
Some of these diactritics aren't actually a part of the standard orthography,
but are used for clarifying pronunciation.

Acute accent: marks unpredictable  stresses; it usually only shows up in
specific forms of the verb.  It will only appear on the penultimate or
antepenultimate syllable.

circumflex: rarely used, but I can't recall what it does exactly.
Something to
do with accent.

breve: I must admit, I've never seen this used.  Probably just a way to
explicitly mark short vowels.

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).
Muskogean languages have a pitch-accent system (much like Japanese).  The
"stress" is on the last syllable, which has the highest pitch.  The acute
accent marks syllables that unexpected have the highest pitch.

>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.
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.

(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.
:-)

Marcus