Re: Language changes, spelling reform (was Conlangea Dreaming)

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:

> > Chevraqis is phonetic
>
> The Kassí syllabry is semi-morphophonemic.  It cannot distinguish /tj/
> from /tS/, for instance, or /ti/ from /tSi/, among other failures.  It
> also uses diacritics for codas, and often syllabifies on morphemic, not
> phonemic, grounds.  For example, "swords" is pifaftúi, syllabified as
> PIf-Af-TÚ-I (lower case indicates diacritics), because pif- is gender 7
> plural prefix.  Also -i (plural) is *always* written seperate, so that
> sukKassíi (Kassí, epecine plural) would be SU*-KA*-SÍ-I, not using the
> long vowel suffix.  Asterisks indicate the diacritic for "following
> consonant geminated".
<delighted look>  Morphophonemic is a word?  Wow!

While there's enough screwy things in the morphology that you could make
a good case for writing Chevraqis in a like fashion, by the time that
magistrate (I really should give him, her or it a name) decided an
alphabet was a good idea, s/he decided also that representing sounds
phonetically would be better, even though that means certain words that
have funky mutations in various word-shapes (there are certain
word-shapes in the morphology where "s" /s/ is replaced by "sj" /S/ or
"y" /j/ by "j" /dZ/, etc., or even stranger variations) won't look
offhand like they come from the same three-"consonant" root.
("Consonant" by Chevraqis' definition, which isn't the same as a
phonetic? phonemic? phonologic? meep? consonant).

OC, since I have to revise the ancestor-language my current examples will
all fly to pieces, but I'm sure it'll just mean different mutations, not
no mutations.

YHL