Re: Scripts

On Thursday 21 February 2002 03:10, Christopher B Wright wrote:
> Just wanted to ask a few questions
> How many of you have scripts?
Kerno,  being a Literate tongue, has a script. It's most likely
some derivative of insular Latin writing, though I havent worked
this out in any detail.

Talarian has a potpourri script system, wherein any given text
might comprise as many as seven different writing systems.

> How many of you use diacriticals as vowels in your scripts?
There aren't diacriticals as such, except in the socalled
Native Alphabet. There, vowels are marked with small dicritical
aitches as nececssary; which is a throwback to its origin as
a cuneiform syllabary. [The three aitches are [x], [h] and [?].]
If the syllabe is /xa/, you'll see an "A" with the "x" diacritic.

The one bona fide diactritical I've come across is a sort of
superscript " ( ", or " ) " which tells you which end of the
line to start reading at. This is very helpfull, since Talarian
can be read L-R, R-L, boustrophedon, U-D and D-U.

In general, there are determiners that can be placed after or
over a word to indicate any of several grammatical or semantic
relationships. For example, the determiner KI can be placed over
the word cramyar to indicate the locative case "in the city".
The determiner PURUS over cramyar indicates "capital city"; the
determiner TUC indicates "cloth city" or "caravan". There are
really very few of these determiners, so the system is not
pervasive.

> How many of you have null letters (letters that don't represent a sound)
> to deal with the problem of diphthongs / multiple vowels per
> consonant?
Not really. To the contrary, the letters as they exist don't
represent their names; so I guess they are sort of anti null
letters. ;) For example, the syllable sign for _ra_ is called
"TR:" /tr:/; _fa_ is called "VLAN"; _ta_ is called "TOCRC".

Well, that's what you get for taking your syllabary from a
language whose phonology is no where close to your own. Talarian
has no voiced consonants, so VLAN, ZUN, NGA, etc. don't work;
plus Anian (from which the Talarians took this syllabary) had
a penchant for strange consonant clusters: TLO, MPIW, TOPT, CTO,
etc. as well as syllabic sibilants.

Padraic.
--
Htoccrciftopumttopt'tpon ozuniima mpiiw op'hcso : quap nofptunum
mii hcso quap : op'tlopetc op'hcso mpiiw oettrsum miihtoccrq.

        -Tcani Htoccrcibabasopt