Re: A little bit about Thagojian typography (WARNING: Unicode)

On May 16, 2005, at 12:25 AM, Paul Bennett wrote:
> Probably more suited to the LLL, and I may well do that after some
> extra
> work crowbarring footnotes and bibliography into it.
> I have it in PDF in case the Unicode gets mangled along the way, if I
> can
> find somewhere to host it.
> The Mark of Following
> The μηρϣηπερיν ϝποκיδיπ (/mEr\ZEper\7n upok2d2p/) or "mark of
> following"
> seems to be the only diacritic in Thagojian, although its realization
> seems to vary from text to text. The oldest form seems to be a macron,
> but
> by the latest documents a circumflex is pretty universal, with the
> majority of exceptions being inverted breves. Along that path, though,
> variations include a dot, a trema, a tilde, a vertical bar, a vertical
> tilde, and many other symbols. Also found in a small number of
> documents
> is a letter-stacking form, reminiscent of medieval documents in Europe.
> Note that any given style is found consistently throughout any given
> document, and indeed apparently consistently through the works of any
> given scribe, so there can be no doubt that the same, single mark is
> being
> represented by a variety of graphical forms. It is plausible that the
> patterns of usage could be reconstructed to give an idea of distinct
> scribal schools or traditions, but such an effort has not yet been
> undertaken.
>
> In the most general and prevalent case, the mark is found above the
> close
> vowels ι, υ, and ϝ, to indicate they're asyllabic, and this
> combination is
> conventionally romanized y, ÿ and w. In the oldest documents, the mark
> is
> only found when the close vowel immediately follows another vowel,
> i.e. as
> a falling diphthong. This usage spread quite quickly to mark all
> consonantal uses of these vowels, and apart from the confusion over the
> graphical form of the mark, the situation was stable for a long time.
> Towards the end of the Thagojian documents, however, the mark began to
> be
> used in previously unexpected places. The most prevalent of these, for
> which there are a significant (but not overwhelming) number of
> examples,
> is over α, in later borrowings from Hebrew, apparently to show ע. In
> earlier documents, ע is borrowed as ńayn (that is, as /ŋ/). This
> graphical
> change seems to show a sound change in Thagojian (or possibly Hebrew?)
> followed by an attempt to represent borrowings that occurred after the
> change. Note that in the majority of cases from the later period,
> newly-borrowed ע is simply omitted, so this change in writing cannot
> have
> been generally accepted. Of further note, there are — also in the later
> period — a small number of sporadic usages of the mark with ε (some of
> which appear to mark א) and one single example with χ, about which very
> little can be determined.
> Paul
Very interesting!
I'm a big fan of |`ayin| becoming /N/, btw. :)
Just a question - in the first term used, written near the top of the
page, i'm seeing what looks to be a number of |yud| representing both
/7/ and /2/.  Is that correct, or did it get mangled on its way to my
computer?


-Stephen (Steg)
  'the creator thought that one language would be enough,
   but Raven thought differently, and made many.'
      ~ the bella coola, according to hyde
        (thanks hanuman! ;) )

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