Re: Orthography help, please.

On 19 Sep 2004 bob thornton <arcanesock@YAH...> wrote:

> The phonemes are: (orthography is indicated for those that I've
> decided upon)
  Did you set up the phonotactics yet? Are there geminates in your
conlang? Are consonant clusters CR allowed? -- where C = (/t/, /d/,
/n/, /s/, /z/, /K/, /K\/, /r\/, /l/) and R = (/r\/, /r\'/) Etc.

  I propose:
/l/ l
/r\/ r

  Shift to the palate may be rendered by adding |y|:
/S/ sy
/Z/ zy

  If sequence /ng/ can be excluded:
/N/ ng
/Ng/ ngg

  I do not see /h/ in your list, thus grapheme |h| can be a
diacritic for aspirates:
/t_h/ th
/d_h/ dh
/k_h/ kh
/g_h/ gh

  Pharyngealized phonemes may be conveyed by |q| or |c|:
/k_?\/ kq, kc
/g_?\/ gq, gc
/m_?\/ mq, mc
/N_?\/ nq, nc (IMHO /n_?\/ can be barred out)

  If clusters CR are not permitted*, retroflexes can be marked by
an |r|:
/t`/ tr
/d`/ dr
/n`/ nr
/s`/ sr
/z`/ zr
/r\`/ rr
/l`/ lr

  Lateral fricatives could be written as:
/K/ sl
/K\/ zl
  but there are retroflex pairs that could result in trigraphs:
/K/ slr
/K\/ zlr
  therefore they might have less intuitive single-letter graphemes:
/K/ x
/K\/ j
/K`/ xr
/K\`/ jr

  * If there are CR clusters, ambiquity can be resolved by an
apostrophe, e.g. /t`/ tr vs. /tr\/ t'r.  Or retroflex pronunciation
can be assigned to the apostrophe: /t`/ t' vs. /tr\/ tr.

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