Re: Is Microsoft conquering the world?! (Re: Orthographies with lotsa diacritics)
From: | Marcus Smith <smithma@...> |
Date: | Sunday, May 28, 2000, 8:07 |
Danny Wier wrote:
>Also (who wrote this?), I should've thought that many national language
scripts
>are the result of collaberation between natives and "palefaces",
Not the one's devised by missionaries a hundred years ago and continued by
tradition.
>Navajo is fine by me as it is,
I've always thought Navajo was a pain to type. Especially nasalized vowels.
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...
I think the double vowel is good for length: it makes the visual pattern fit
closer to the phonetic rythm. Heavy syllables are clearly longer than light
ones, and the writing makes it look that way as well. Not a good reason for
orthographic choices. Besides, the accent is important for unpredictable
stress. You could use <u> for the schwa since there are only three vowel
phonemes: we have two extra vowels to do something with. Chickasaw just marks
it with <a> since that is the underlying phoneme, and lengthening that sound
makes it /a:/
>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?
/h/ never occurs after another consonant, so <sh> and <ch> work well, as does
<lh> for the lateral fricative; it makes the system simpler: <l> for a lateral
approximant, <lh> for a lateral fricative.
Marcus