Re: NATLANGS: What's that writing system?

Shreyas Sampat wrote:
> This woman holds up a tray of salt and (evidently; I don't know
> Japanese) says that it's called /tSao/ or possibly /tSaw/ in [some
> language that is not Japanese] before she goes on to identify it as
> salt. There's some mysterious foreign language subtitle there which I
> absolutely cannot identify; does anyone recognise it? It's clearly not
> hanzi and doesn't appear to be Ge'ez or anything else on Omniglot...
> http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v520/fourwillows/chao.jpg
The language is Amharic. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to represent
ejective, or glottalised, consonants in either IPA or CXS, and neither
of those terms appears in Henrik's IPA to CXS chart, which is what I use
both to learn CXS and to refresh my IPA. So, using the diacritic "_?"
(hopefully someone might reply and show me the proper diacritic!) to
represent ejectiveness/glottalisation, the word is the Amharic word for
"salt" and is pronounced /tS_?@w/. The first "fidel" (that's the Amharic
name for the script) character is /tS_?@/, and the second, which usually
does not have the line extending past the bottom of the curve, is /w1/.
However, the "consonant + /1/" series of letters also serves to
represent syllable-final consonants without any following vowel, as in
this word.

Thomas

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