Re: Scripts

At 09:10 PM 2/20/02 -0500, Christopher B Wright wrote:
>Just wanted to ask a few questions—
>
>How many of you have scripts?
    I do.  Rav Zarruvo has its script pretty well established; I'm still
entertaining ideas for the Kymaksii script.

>How many of you use diacriticals as vowels in your scripts?
    Rav Zarruvo does and doesn't -- the "diacritics" for vowels are nearly
as large as the consonant letters.
    Kymaksii will (though that's not especially helpful).

>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?
    Since neither of these languages has diphthongs or multiple vowels,
that problem hasn't yet arisen for me.
    If it's a problem in your own script, I'd suggest (just offhand)
creating a way of writing a consonant without a vowel, and a separate
diacritic for any combination of vowels.

>I'm asking because I just took the script for Sturnan out of the bottom of
>a pile of schoolwork and started transliterating some stuff into it. I had
>to insert a null consonant for this very reason and decided to make it
>stand for /h/ as well, making it a bit hard to distinguish. Eventually,
>perhaps in a century or three, the Ifenians will get angry enough to
>separate it into two consonants. I omit the null consonant in
>transliteration but leave the /h/ to make it clearer. Otherwise, it could
>be /aui/ or /hahuhi/.
    The null consonant idea has some merit, though I'd suggest reserving
that for syllables (especially leading syllables) that start with vowels.

>Perhaps the ancient Sturnan didn't have /h/ at all and inserted it
>recently. That's much more likely than a lot of /h/'s disappearing recently.
    Was yours the language where /h/ strengthens the consonant in which it
appears?  (I don't remember very clearly, even though that's just been
discussed in the past week... see the anecdote below.*)  If you, you might
try inserting an apostrophe for the null consonant, or at any rate between
vowels that are parts of separate syllables.

    *I was doing vocal warm-ups last night, as part of a local theater
production of "The Wizard of Oz," and one of the exercises was the syllable
"Yo" repeated over and over.  In Rav Zarruvo, which I'd spent part of the
afternoon working over, "Yo" is the preposition that coverts a verb from
imperative to definite mood, and so (because of the VSO word order) starts
many a sentence -- so while we were doing the exercise, a part of my mind
was saying, "Yeah, come on, finish the sentence already!"


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