Re: Madzhi script online

On Sat, 23 Mar 2002, BP Jonsson wrote:

> At 10:03 2002-03-22 +0200, Y.Penzev wrote:
>
> >Yeah, it looks great, especially in Thryomanes.
> >But I've got strong objections against the usage of certain characters that
> >an unusual phonetic value is assigned to them!!!
>
> I agree.  Especially the /g/ and /G/ characters ought to be reversed, since
> it is
> 0490 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER GHE WITH UPTURN
> 0491 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER GHE WITH UPTURN
> which is /g/ in Ukrainian.  Moreover the Ukrainian /g/ was for some reason
> suppressed during Soviet times, so that
Well, Madzhi did take the Cyrillic script from the Russians, not the
Ukrainians. But I think I will keep the Ghe as /g/, and use Ghe with
stroke (what I have for /R/) for /G/, and use Er with tick for /R/ as you
suggest.

> Also I find the Abxasian _ha_ which you used for /A/ unbearable.  For
> aesthetic reasons I would have prefered if you had used the big and little
> yus'es for /A/ and /@/, but I can appreciate that for con-historical
> (Soviet script policies) reasons you can't use those!  What about using the
> hard sign for /@/ and the schwa letter for /A/?
Yus! Why didn't I think of that? The Madzhi had already built up their
empire in North America by the time the USSR came around, so we have no
problems using Yus! Thank you! (And that is one of my favourite letters
too!)

>
> BTW I recently con-structed a comparative table of alphabets for
> Rumiyaan.  The Arabic and the three different Roman versions weren't very
> hard, but the Cyrillic one is problematic WRT the rendering of the phonemes
> /dZ J h/.  I eventually choose to use _zh n x_ with macron, but I think
> these are actually unplausible!  I suppose I could use _n with descender_
> for /J/ and _x with descender_ for /h/, but should I use _ch with
> descender_ or _zh with descender_ for /dZ/.  I would prefer _zh with
> descender_ but have no idea what sound it stands for in the languages where
> it's used.
You could use Serbian Dzh (like Ts but with the descender in the middle
instead of the right), it is also used for /dZ/. For /J/ you could use
the Serbian Nje (looks like a N-softsign ligature) which is used for /J/
in Serbian and Macedonian (Serbian Dzh is in Macedonian too).

/h/ is a difficulter question, but I would recommend the letter I use,
which is used in Bashkir and Azeri to represent /h/.

---ferko

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