Re: conlan/natlang coincidences

Quoting "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

> Quoting Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:
> > Quoting Daniel Andreasson Vpc-Work <daniel.andreasson@...>:
> > > "Seoul" in Swedish is /s2Ul/ (or thereabouts).
> >
> > The variant spelling _Söul_, I very much hope, suggests you're not
> plain
> > wrong. Or might it be might that that's not an umlaut but a
> diaeresis
> > telling us that is is /so.ul/?
>
> If it were a diaeresis, surely it would be placed on the
> *second* of the two vowels? Cf. Obsolescent English usage
> _coöperate_, _preëmpt_, etc.

Well, one might always hope so ...

Tolkien apparently felt free to place it on either vowel; variations like
_Ëa_~_Eä_ are common in Quenya.

> > Back when the Latin alphabet was first used to write non-Latin
> > languages, they should've started connocting new signs instead
> > of plaguing us with all these digraphs and diacritics ...
>
> I dunno. From the point of view of printing, it seems to me
> easier to create one set of diacritics, and one set of letters,
> each of which may vary indepedently of the other (as long as
> both are present in any graph), rather than creating wholly
> new letters for each language's phoneme.
But printing wasn't an issue back then. And when someone invented a sign for,
say, [S] there would've been some hope that those creating other languages'
orthographies would've used it.

> Diacritics also usually
> give clues as to pronunciation.
Hm, well, coming across an acute accent on a vowel, I'm apt to believe it
indicates either stress or phonemic length. Enter French ...

> I agree with you about diagraphs, though.  Is <th> /T/ or [t_h]
> or simply [t]?
Or a cluster [th] ...

This said, I wasn't completely serious. I actually rather like diacritics, and
don't really much mind digraphs as long as the corresponding two-phoneme
sequence isn't common in the language. What does annoy me is the lack of
standardization across languages - like the umpteen values of "ch" across
European languages, and, particularly relevant in this case, how ¨ indicates
both umlaut and that two vowels should be read separately.

                                                           Andreas