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Re: Vozgian orthography

From:Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 25, 2003, 16:35
Ktabbe Jan van Steenbergen:

> And Yitzik writes: "Or GHE for /g/, GHE WITH UPTURN for /G/. It depents on > their frequency." > > Good point. Well, since the difference in frequency between /g/ and /G/
will be
> obvious (something like 10:1), I think I will follow your suggestion. > > Should I understand that you guys don't like the idea of Cyrillic G with > crossbar? AFAICT, in certain Central Asian languages it represents an
uvular
> fricative?
Yes. GHE WITH STROKE (U+0492/U+0493) is better. But I have even more stange proposition. Use COMBINING TILDE (U+0303). Put it over GHE for /G/, over TE for /T/, over DE for /D/! It should work!
> I would rather prefer T with descender, but that would cause the problem
that
> Cyrillic D has already a descender of its own (two, actually). Or perhaps
T and
> D with crossbar.
See above.
> But I don't know how probable it is for a Cyrillic script to > import a non-Cyrillic character rather than to use one that exists for
another
> language. Hence my question about the likeliness of eths, thorns, and
Greek
> thetas in a Cyrillic alphabet; they look more "European" to me, even
though
> Bashkir could provide Cyrillic characters.
Well, I don't know much about IB, it may be a strange world where it might happen. But *here* it is not possible, IMVHO.
> * Ä (a with diaeresis), until now my favourite option
Looking for European kind of script. Use it! In CYR-range it is U+04D2/U+04D3.
> * Æ (a-e ligature). I found it in Unicode's Cyrillic listing, > but I have no idea if it is actually in use anywhere
In Ossetian.
> * @ (schwa): used in some Central Asian Cyrillic scripts
Forget it. It's misleading.
> /2/ > * Ö (o with diaeresis). Exists in Komi.
Use it! It's U+04E6/U+04E7. Exist in Gagauz and Karaim too. Both are European.
> /y/ > All I'm sure about is that it will look like <ü> in the romanisation. I am > still wondering what to do with the Cyrillic spelling of the triangle /i/,
/1/,
> /y/. At this moment I have been thinking about something based on the
Ukrainian
> model: > /i/ - Ukrainian-Belorussian i ("our" i) > /1/ - Russian i (reverse N) > /y/ - yeru ("61")
Never, never, never do it!
> However, a few alternatives are available for /y/: > * straight u (U+04AE/U+04AB), found in some Altaic orthographies > * Cyrillic u with diaeresis (U+04F0/U+04F1) > Obviously, a choice for one of those would also affect the orthography of
/i/
> and /1/, since in that case Russian i for /i/ and yeru for /1/ would be
more
> likely.
Absolutely. I vote for U WITH DIAERESIS.
> In general, I see two possible models: > Either a Central-Asian-based version, with s-descender for /T/,
z-descender for
> /D/, schwa for /&/, barred o for /2/, etc., > or a more European version, possibly with eths, thorns, and diaereses (for > vowel that are, indeed, umlauted).
Wanna You're-up? Gettit!
> While the Central-Asian model is probably more Cyrillic (in this sense
that all
> characters are already in use somewhere) and more efficient, something
inside
> me rebels against the idea. Probably the fact that it doesn't really seem
to
> fit with the fact that Vozgian is a Slavic and not an Altaic language, and
with
> the location I have in mind for it.
Agreed. The only limitation. *Cyrillic* letters with diaeresis are non-available in standard fonts. You may use their *Latin* homographs, but don't forget to specify charset to utf-8, or use their *names* otherwise you'll have conflicting encodings. Alternative: use any kind of Cyrillic encoding (I still recommend Win-125smth), and a COMBINING DIAERESIS (U+0308). I've tried them all. Variant with &auml; specified looks cool. Combining tilde (&#x303;) can be clearly seen too.
> Jan
Yitzik