Re: silindion alphabet added to frath-wiki page

--- Douglas Koller <laokou@...> wrote:

> From: Elliott Lash <erelion12@...>
>
> > A (rather poor quality) scan of the Silindion
> alphabet
> > and an example of its use it now up at my
> frath-wiki
> > page, for anyone who is interested in viewing it.
>
> Although the end results look very different, I am
> de temps en temps amazed at some of the overlap in
> terms of conscripts. To wit:
>
> Silindion's [m] is Géarthnuns' [a]
> Silindion's [N] is Géarthnuns' [aI]
> Ayeri's [ga] is Géarthnuns' [S]
> Teonaht's cursive o-tilde is Géarthnuns' cursive
> [kf]
> Teonaht's [k] is Géarthnuns' [x]
>
> Does this mean we aren't as creative as we think we
> are, or are they happy coincidences (like Turkish
> "bad" supposedly means "bad" as in English)?

I really think that there will be coincidences in
constructing alphabetic (or syllabic) stricks, merely
because one usually needs to keep strokes to a minimum
for simplicity. I'd be more surprised to see a high
degree of similary between two unrelated logographic
scripts.

----- Further notes on Silindion's Alphabet
Below------

Silindion's |N| is actually pronounced /g/, it merely
records a pronunciation that has long since died away.
 Silindion is fairly conservative in its native
orthography.

|j2| (the lower j in the alphabetic chart) is actually
not pronounced for the most part - and it is usually
only used before |e| and |i|.  It usually can be added
to any initial front vowel, to "flesh out" the word, -
if a scribe felt the word was too short. It indicates
a palatal glide that later was lost before front
vowels.  It is used (in a simplified form) as the
palatal diacritic.

 Sometimes, it is used to write the infinitive
suffixes -iello and -eallo, which are then spelled
|ij2ello| and |ej2allo|.  This leads to an occassional
|ej2| as the alternative to long |e| (the second e in
the chart). It is not often used to write the
infinitive suffix -yello, which is usually expressed
by a palatal diacritic in the case of consonant stems
and |j1| in the case of (w) and w-stems.  However,
sometimes |j2| is used.

|g| is a silent letter, which indicates a lost /g/
sound, it is sometimes added to any initial /u/ or
/o/, to "flesh out" the word.

|x| is a silent letter, which indicates a lost /x/
sound. However, it has become used to indicate a long
vowel in some dialects which have acquired long
vowels.   This is common in K-stem verbs, such as:

 la- "ride", which is spelled |lax|, having the 3rd
singular present |lax.n| (with dotted |x|, indicating
a CV unit).  This is regularly pronounced /lan/, but
can be pronounced /la:n/. From this, the sequence
|Vx.| was used to write any long vowel. Significantly,
the letter long |e| could be replaced then with |Ex.|.


the letter |s-| was originally used for a sound
between /c/, /s/ and /S/, which is somewhat rhotic.
I'm not sure what it really is. Anyway, eventually
this was replaced with /s:/ (geminate s). Another
source of
/s:/ was from medial /t/, via /T/.  Hence, the letters
|T|, |s-| and lenited |t| were interchangeable, for
the most part.  Only where a word clearly was related
to a word with |t| was lenited |t| preferred. An
example is:  morassurni "night-shade". This could be
written
|moraTurni|, |moras-urni|  or |morat~urni|, but only
the last was common.

The letter |T| is usually /T/, but is (depending on
dialect) occasionally used for /s:/ or /s/.

The diacritic /./ is sometimes ommitted or used for
/VC/:
An example is  the word  _filisi_ "I come", this could
be spelled:
 |fil.si|,  |fil.s.|, |filisi|, |filsi|, |fils|,
|fils.i|, |fl.isi|, etc., usually though, no
difficulies would arrise.

-Elliott








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