Re: sabyuka : consonants, orthography, and a few things more

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> How do you rank grammarians? On what criteria? Sorry to ask those questions,
> but I don't even see how that's possible...
Speech contests, perhaps?  Each one must give a lengthy speech, and his
or her rivals all listen for grammatical errors, if they catch one, they
point it out, and, unless he or she can show that it wasn't an error, a
point is taken away.  The person who has the most points at the end
wins.

That's just one idea.  :-)

> Where would conlangers fit in such a society? Would they be hunted and
> persecuted, considered to pervert the gift of God, or would they be praised and
> revered like prophets, considered to have been given a special talent by God to
> replicate its own gift?
I think the Kassi would probably consider conlangers heretics, or at
least insane.  :-(

> I find that pretty logical, and though I don't have any example I'm sure it's
> backed up by the use in natlangs.
Romanized Japanese uses _ssh_ and _tch_ or _cch_ (I prefer the second)

> Pretty straightforward.
One of my early conlangs used ' as a glottal stop and to indicate
ejectives, but there were cases where I would need to disambiguate
clusters, so I ended up using {.}, so that I'd have things like {t.l}
vs. {tl} vs. (at least in principle) {t'l} which would be [tl], [tK],
and [t'l]

>
> >
> > Here is the transliteration of the vowel system :
> > /i/ --> |i|
> > /e/ --> |e|
> > /ei/ --> |ê|
> > /@/ --> |à|
>
> I kind of find it strange to use an accented letter to mark the schwa. The
> schwa is to me the quintessence of the unstressed letter, and marking it with
> an accented letter is to me contradictory with its very nature. I'd rather see
> the schwa marked with a non-accented letter. The choice would be thus:
> - whether to switch |a| and |à|,
> - or to use another letter for /@/.
> For the second possibility, you could use |y| as proposed (if that wouldn't
> make any ambiguity with /j/ - although you may want to add a little ambiguity,
> to add some theological discussions and disputes :)) -).
An early version of the Kassi script marked fricatives with a diacritic
on the corresponding stops, I later rejected that idea, but I had a
passage in their scripture, on food laws that forbade "creatures that
[vannas or bannas]" - vannas means "to walk (on two legs)", while bannas
means "to breathe", thus the ban was on either bipedal animals or all
land animals.  The original manuscript was written by tiNlasta (the
founder of their religion) as she was dying, and her writing is unclear,
specifically there was uncertainty over whether that diacritic was
there, or it was just a random ink blot.  :-)

"Blasphemer!  You are eating a breathing animal!"
"Bah!  The text clearly reads *walking* animal, this creature walked on
all sixes!" [most animals on their world are hexapedal]
"Revisionist!  That is clearly an ink blot."
"Heretic!  TiNlasta would never make such an error!"

And so on.  :-)

However, after I revised the script, that possibility was lost for
ambiguity, and thus I decided to reject that theological debate.  :-)

But, there are a few characters that are similar in appearance, so maybe
there are still possibilities of her shaky hands creating confusion.
:-)

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