Re: Dropping Q and C (was: Some isolating verb patterns)

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 18:44:33 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
> Yes, |k| is more common in English than it is in the Romancelangs, where
> it is usually confined to foreign words and the metric prefix kilo-.
Hmm? It's the usual spelling before front vowels, which includes
native words such as "ken" or "kick". Though it's true that I can't
think of that many words offhand that start in ke- or ki- as opposed
to, say, ca-.

> While I can readily think of examples of conlangs that use |c| = /k/ - for
> example Quenya and Sindarin (tho Quenya follows Latin in having /kw/
> spelled |qu| and not |cw|)
Interestingly enough, Vietnamese does this, too -- though I'm not sure
whether |qu| replaces *|ku| or *|cu| since apparently both |k| and |c|
occur.

But I found it amusing that |q| exists in the language, if only in the
sequence |qu|.

> And |q| is another of those pesky letters that are not really needed in
> the modern Roman alphabet, and it tends to be put to other uses in
> natlangs, for example: [q] (Innuit), [c] (Albanian), [?] (Maltese), [ts\_h]
>   (Pinyin), [!\] (Zulu and Xhosa) inter_alia.
Though for Maltese, it's not necessarily "put to other uses" -- from
what I've read, [?] is a development of Arabic /q/, and the
pronunciation [?] for /q/ is used in some other dialects/descendants
of Arabic as well, so using the letter |q| for what might be called
/q/ phonemically makes some sense -- it appears not to be completely
arbitrary.

(I had wondered how Maltese might be written in Arabic script and had
considered using alif for |q| due to the modern pronunciation, but
since finding out that it reflects original /q/ I think that qaf would
probably be better.)



On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 01:48:42 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
> > In conlangs it is often used to denote [N], but I know of no natlang that
> > does this.
>
> I believe Fijian has 'q'=[Ng].
I believe this is correct.

Along with |b| = [mb] and |d| = [nd], IIRC. (|g| is used for [N] and
hence isn't available for [Ng].) And |c| for [D]!

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Watch the Reply-To!