Re: Scripts

yes, your Kash writing system is similar to my Tunu system--although the Tunu
script looks much like Khmer. Tunu is similar to Kash in some other ways too but
it lacks most of Kash "refinements": Kash doesn't need a topical affix to change
the word order in the sentence ; it has several personal prefixes ; it features
case suffixes and plural flexions ; its compound and construct words ellide when
merging ; it has way more than 8 consonants and those can cluster ; it can
reverse genitive word order with -ni ; etc. It's too bad its derived and
compound words squiggle into such unpredictably results--but i ranted enough
about that already.

I don't know whether Tunu speakers could tell "ayi" from "ai" but that would
make no sense anyway because "yi" [ji] is an "unlawful and impossible"
combination that cannot occur in the language. This is because I made sure that
if you know the first syllable of a phrase then you can parse all the following
words even if you don't know any of them. All roots are CVCV and C excludes S,
that is y and w. For instance "wayo" is not a legal root. Affixes are only a
few:
"cases" : a-, e-, o-, u/w-, wa-, we-, wo-, owa-, ewa-
conjunctions : i-, wai-, wi-
verbal voices : bai-, cai-, kai-, lai-, mai-, nai-, sai-, tai-
verb suffixes : -nya, -nye, -nyo, -nyu, -mya, -mye, -myo, -myu.

The vowels of the -myV and -nyV suffixes are themselves the "cases" a-, e-, o-
and u-. All these affixes combine with each other but their respective meanings
prevent them from combining in an "unlawful" way.  For instance you could have a
combination like "yukaiCVCVmyo", but never "oukaiwiuyiCVCV" because "ou" and
"yi" don't make sense. The whole system is very artificial but i got used to it.
I tried a hundred different affixing systems but the current one is the one i
could handle best.

Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:
>>>
Mathias wrote:
>tunu's got this all. a consonant written alone is pronounced as
consonant+a.
>there is a kind of null consonant aleph "a". e is written a+e and o is a+o.
>u is written w+u and i is y+i. the diphtong ai is written "ayi"........
That looks quite similar to the Kash system.  Is it possible to distinguish
diphthongal "ayi" [aj] and ""ai"" with hiatus,[a.i]  i.e. 2 syllables?
(Looks like it isn't; perhaps sequences of vowels don't occur in Tunu-- CVCV
rules!).
<<<


Mathias
www.geocities.com/kalatunu/index.htm