Re: And who needs vowels?

It seems like this kind of spelling would present no problem at all as long as
there were a set of conventional rules for inserting "implied vowels". For
example: "g is ga except after la or pa when it is gu unless followed by po
whereupon it becomes gi." In that way the consonants are really just another
syllabary and vowels are only needed when they begin a word.

In fact, by using both upper and lower case consonants a larger syllabary can
be constructed which has even more possible implied vowel rules. Thus we might
have "HG" (haga) "hG" (higa) "Hg" (hagu) and "hg" (higu). The apostrophe could
be used to chop off the final vowel of the last syllable, or to modify the
vowel of an internal syllable, e.g. bK' = bake, BK' = book, b'K' = bike, B'K' =
buck, r'bK = Rebeca.

--gary


--- John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:

> Perfect timing here: my mother got me a book on "weird words in the world's
> languages" for Christmas, & a few pages of it center on long consonant
> clusters. Tashlhiyt Berber is reported to have lots of words with no vowels
> at all: there's no phonem/tic transcriptions so we'll have to gess the exact
> pronunciation, but a few amusing entries include _rglx_ "I locked" or
> _tkkststt_ "you detached it". :)
>
> (A variety of Czech words w/o vowels are also listed, but their existence
> should be familiar to most here, no?)
>
> John Vertical
>
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