Re: new font creator

Dear Remi,
As you divine, I'm no fan of the Japanese syllabary - I much prefer Amharic.
Omeina has both above- and below- diacritics, generally based on purely
calligraphic principles. Writing in Omeina is seen as an art rather than as
a functional means of communication. The only permissible CVC sequences are
when C2 = l, n or r, and there is a diacritic which shows this. That's cool,
since our languages don't have the same phonologies, so our syllabaries will
be different. I don't really have diacritics which remove vowels, rather it
suppresses them, so that the "consonant cluster" diacritic if used over the
two syllables nominally regarded as (say) sa + te ( = -ste, the instrumental
case ending) will convey the idea 's(a)+te', whereas if it is not used the
sequence will be read 'sate' = /sate/. But there isn't anything which
removes initial vowels from a syllable; in that case the syllable is the
vowel. Initial vowels and diphthongs are very common in Omeina.
To your sentence:
some of the symbology I found a bit confusing - are you using the IPA or
some version of it, since I notice the words are enclosed in square brackets
rather than IPA 'slashes'. In other words, (for example) does t_h represent
IPA /T/ , an aspirated /t/, or /t/+/h/, etc? Is j = IPA /Z/ as in French
"je" or IPA /j/ as in German "ja"? And what are the ) symbols for? That
said, the grammar looks interesting, and our syllabaries don't appear to be
too different - unsurprising I suppose, given that syllabaries will only
tend to work with certain phonetic structures.
I can understand your confusion over the Omeina symbols for n and a. They
are alike, apart from the fact that a is always preceded by two dots (a
colon if you will), but your analysis is excellent considering the material
you had to work with! No, there is no exclamation mark, so the whole
sentence is:
e|la|n+du:|na  o|me|i|na  ru|s+ku|la|de|a  da|ri
There are separate diacritics for "preceding sonant" (whether nasal, lateral
or rhotic) as well as "consonant cluster", here s+k. The basic form of any
symbol is the "consonant+a" version, so that this could in fact do serive
for (say) t or ta, though since t cannot exist without a following vowel (or
consonant cluster combination, in this case only ts is possible) there is no
confusion (besides, a little confusion is nice!)
In origin, the whole labial group gets its shape from the outline of a pair
of lips, which accounts for the likeness to the cipher for 3. Can I see your
syllabary? I think they are the natural way to write a language!
Mike
> =====================
> Remi Villatel
> maxilys@normandnet.fr
> =====================

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