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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