----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <cowan@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 3:02 PM
Subject: Re: Novus Scriptio [was: capitolisation]
> Barbara Barrett scripsit:
>
> > Each letter has an inherent vowel (which follows in the initial/medial
and
> > precedes for the final), but unlike Indian alphabets which also have
> > inherent vowels, the vowel is always unread unless *activated* by a
> > diacritic, whereby the letter becomes a syllabic - otherwise it only
> > represented the phoneme in isolation (this solved the problem of Indian
> > scripts of how to negate the inherent vowel for consonant clustering).
>
> I don't follow this: if the inherent vowel is not pronounced unless a
> diacritic is given, how can it be said to be inherent? The essence of an
> abugida (like Indic, Ethiopic, or Canadian Syllabics) is that the
> inherent vowel is pronounced *unless* suppressed by a virama or overridden
> by a vowel mark. It sounds like you have an abjad with mandatory
> vowel marks, like Tengwar.
>
> Note that there has never been a writing system in which vowel marks
> were attached to the consonants that followed them in order of speaking,
> though some vowel marks (like Devanagari short i) have migrated to the
> left of the consonant and thus *appear* to precede in written order
> what they follow in spoken order. The English and non-Beleriand Sindarin
> modes of the Tengwar adopt this system, which makes the Tengwar very
> difficult to encode in Unicode.
>
> > The New system was Base 12, the angular numerals were based on Runes and
> > Ogham (one corner for each unit; thus one had one corner, two two
corners,
> > three three corners, and so on). Cursive forms developed for writing
numbers
> > within texts (more visually elegant!) and these became used as syllabics
> > within the system; This resulted in all languages using the same names
for
> > numbers.
>
> That's hard to swallow, that so many and so diverse peoples could adopt
> not only a new and unheard-of base for numbers, but to actually abandon
> their number names entire, including such fundamentals as "one" (which is
> also used as the indefinite article in languages that have one).
>
> > The age of exploration, the discovery of the New World, and the opening
of
> > the Orient, naturally led to missionaries being sent to these new lands
> > (although it was a brave Male missionary who'd risk Central and South
> > America as Male Europeans had no immunity to the native illness known in
the
> > Old World as the Red Plague). It was many centuries later that it was
> > discovered that the virus could not survive in blood with even the
smallest
> > trace of estrogen - an a remarkably similar compound occurred naturally
in a
> > mainstaple of the jungle diet - the Giant Yam.
>
> If males didn't have estrogen in their bloodstreams they'd be dead.
Estrogens
> are fundamental to mammalian life.
>
> --
> "But the next day there came no dawn, John Cowan
> and the Grey Company passed on into the jcowan@reutershealth.com
> darkness of the Storm of Mordor and were
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> lost to mortal sight; but the Dead
http://reutershealth.com
> followed them. --"The Passing of the Grey Company"
>