Haceks and letters with ascenders

My latest language, Lindiga, uses haceks (or carons) to indicate retroflex
sounds. I originally had dots under the letters, but they were hard to read
when underlined, and required special fonts to work on web pages. The
problem now is that the apostrophes after the letter, which replace the
hacek with letters that have ascenders, can run into a grave accent on the
following letter, as in the word {pel^i`na} "jelly doughnut". (You can see
what this looks like at the bottom of the preliminary, already outdated
Lindiga page at http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/Lindiga/index.html).

So I thought it might be better to use the v-shaped form of the hacek even
with ascenders, and I even redid the text on the color chart (which is at
http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/lindiga-colors.png). But in some ways I
think it looks worse that way. The problem is that I have a lot of
retroflex sounds, and I can't find any other diacritic that would work
without requiring special fonts ... cedilla doesn't work with {d} or {z}.

I suppose I could find a better alphabet, or create one, but if I'm going
to use the Latin alphabet, it looks like my options are limited. So either
I go back to using the dots, or continue using the haceks and figure out
some other way to deal with the vowels. Alternatively, looking at how
Latvian solves its "g with cedilla" problem (printing it as a turned comma
_above_ the lower case g), it might be interesting to try printing the
hacek _under_ the letter if it has a descender. That would still require a
special font, but at least it would be readable with the standard fonts....

--
languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>---
hmiller (Herman Miller)   "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
@io.com  email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
\ "Subject: teamouse" /  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin

Replies