Re: conlan/natlang coincidences

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.

> 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. Diacritics also usually
give clues as to pronunciation.

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

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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