Re: First post: presenting Classical Alyis
| From: | Abel Chiaro <pchavesjr+conlang@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, March 22, 2007, 19:27 |
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On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:22:26 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson
<conlang@...> wrote:
>Plain Unicode text works in principle, but peoples
>mail readers may or may not be able to display it
>correctly. That's why we use CXS for phone*ic
>transcription, for example.
>
>Speaking of Unicode issues, an URI like
>
>:>
http://wordworld.wiki-site.com/index.php/Classical_%C4%82lyis
>
>Is hard to type. You may want to create a page
>[[Classical Alyis]] (spelling without diacritics) which
>redirects to [[Classical Ä‚lyis]] (Unicode spelling).
>That device is quite popular on FrathWiki <wiki.frath.net>.
>Also you may want to use precomposed
>ăĕĭŏŭĂĔĬŎŬ
>etc. rather than combining diacritics, since those still
>are likely to look better in most Windows applications,
>especially in Upper Case.
Actually, I *do* use precomposed ǣ, Ǣ, ă, &#277;, ĭ, ŏ,
ŭ, Ă, Ĕ, Ĭ, Ŏ, Ŭ... I'm
confused.
By the way, that's exactly why I had to resort to the macron for stressed
<æ>, since there's no LATIN SMALL/CAPITAL LETTER AE WITH BREVE... >:-( If at
least they had another COMBINING BREVE, suited for uppercase letters... Is
there a better way around it?
>Is this really your first language? Really impressive!
Hey, thanks for that! I'd love some suggestions, if I may ask!
>The breve as a stress mark is a good deal confusing! :-)
Haha, I thought it could be. :-) But it does look exotic, doesn't it?
>Is there any special (concultural?) reason you prefer it to the
>acute?
Yes, there is: the stress mark used in the Ályis script (called Ánvalyis
"the writing", by the way) is identical to a breve. For the romanization, I
did consider using the acute as the preferred default, since to me it's much
easier to input (I'm on an XWindow System with a BR-ABNT2 keyboard mapping),
but then the sample texts gave me the impression of shouting... :-) On the
other hand, at least with XWindow and my keyboard layout, and in OOo Writer,
the breve is entered with (behold!) AltGr+Shift+\ and the macron with
AltGr+Shift+[, so it's not really that much of a trouble to write it...
Thus, the final word is: acutes (or graves or carets or diaeresis or carons,
for that matter, as one just needs to mark the stressed vowel) are just
fine, but breves are more accurate (at least graphically speaking).
In the mean time, I'm working on updating the glyphs for the ánvalyis script
to my wiki.
>And I just can't get my head around Ŋ for /ɲ/ (CXS
>/J/)! :-) If the issue is with capitalization, there
>actually is an Ɲ U+019D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH LEFT
>HOOK in Unicode, although I readily agree that neither ɲ
>nor Ɲ are very aesthetically pleasing -- how is one to
>write them in cursive to start with? I for one vastly prefer
>diacritics to IPA xymbols in Romanization exactly because of
>the issues of cursive writing and capitalization, but I'm
>aware there are those who abhor diacritics! :-)
Yeah, this LATIN LETTER N WITH LEFT HOOK is indeed ugly... and I'm aware
that ŋ is the IPA letter for the velar nasal, but again I chose the LATIN
LETTER ENG for ease of input: with XWindow+BR_ABNT2, all I need is
AltGr+[Shift]+G... and the eng is really beautiful when in italics,
especially with the Gentium font by SIL (great font for linguists, by the way).
Speaking again of graphical proximity to ánvalyis, I would have preferred to
use ogoneks with all the basic consonants (that is, b, p, d, t, z, s, g, k,
l, r, m, n), because there all their "h-counterparts" have descenders, but
the COMBINING OGONEK looks poor with most of them (and typing AltGr+Shift+=
(the ogonek) doesn't cut it, as there aren't mappings for all those
consonants with the ogonek...) — and I'd have to thing of something else
about g, which already has a descender... H and Y will have to do.
As for diacritics (or other markings) on consonants... I do like them, but I
wanted ályis transliteration as clean as possible; hence I prefer to use LY
to Ł, NY to Ŋ. I also stick with TH and DH because the thorn (þ Þ) and the
eth (ð Ð) still look a bit weird to me. :-) Bear in mind that those
consonant variants in the transliteration chart are the *optional* ones I
would use to have letter-to-letter correspondence between ánvalyis and the
latin alphabet. Personally, I think <dhinălyis> (or <dhinályis>) "our speak"
looks much better that way than <ðinăłis> or <ðináłis>...
Again, thank you for your comments!
Cheers,
- Abel.
--
"Hæ ástis lástethe!"
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