Re: CHAT: feckly off-topic (was: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation)

dirk elzinga wrote:
>
> On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> > Sally Caves wrote:
> > > Several people have commented on my "user unfriendly" spelling of
> > > Teonaht;
> > > someone told me it was "counter-productive" to make "th" into "ht," and
> > > "y" /j/ into "u,"
> >
> > Well, those certainly are *odd* transliterations ...
> >
> > But anyway, when I see Teonaht, I feel rather less guilty about my own
> > transcription.  I mean, <ty> for /tS/ isn't that strange, especially not
> > compared to {u} for /j/!
In South Wales, "u" is pronounced like /i/:  du, "black," is "dee."
But I was using u for /j/ long before I'd been exposed to Welsh.

Dirk wrote:
> I'm not sure why everyone is so bothered by <u> for [j]. Both <u> and
> <y> ultimately come from Greek <upsilon>, which in Greek was originally
> pronounced [u], was then fronted to [y] (!), and then unrounded to [i]
> in the modern language. A very nice set of sound changes, if you ask me,
> and perfectly plausible as the source for exactly the kind of
> transcription that Sally used in Teonaht. (As a matter of fact, one of
> the many ways in which Modern Greeks write [i] is with <upsilon>; i.e.,
> <u>.)
Thanks!  Actually, it was the Greek alphabet that I was poring over in
my very early teens for inspiration for Teonaht, and the "u" as /i//j/
probably took upsilon as source for this transliteration.  Remember that
it is
a transliteration, basically, of the Teonaht script which writes the /j/
sound as an upside-down "u" with a dot in the middle of it.  When
Teonaht
printers, much to the ire of its the more conservative citizens, decided
to develop a Roman script, they made some arbitrary decisions, but they
are tradition now and not open to change.  It's not "odd" to them, but
then there are so many things that are odd to us: like Irish practice of
simply not pronouncing so many of the consonants and consonant clusters
that they insist on putting in their words.  And French: you've got a
fourteenth (or even earlier) pronunciation governing twentieth-century
writing conventions, even though so many of those final consonants and
whole syllables are not pronounced!  English isn't much better!  I think
"u" as /j/ is so much more logical than "-ough" for /o/.  At least it's
phonetic.

> I also kind of like the <h> before the stop to indicate the fricative.
> In the practical orthography which is used by the Western Shoshone and
> Gosiutes, the combination <hC> (where C is any one of <p>, <t>, <ts>,
> <k>, or <kw>) is always a voiceless fricative. This has more to do with
> the particulars of the Shoshone sound system, but the Shoshones who are
> literate seem to manage just fine, even if they were English-literate
> before they were Shoshone-literate.
>
Before I learned Old English I had always thought that our "wh" words
were spelled backwards.  The "h" definitely precedes the "w" instead
of following it, and indeed that's how it was written in Alfred's day.
When I made my "th" clusters later, I decided (or, excuse me, the
Teonaht orthographers decided) to make "h" an initial marker of fricati-
zation.  It's not known how long ago they developed a roman script;
I'm guessing around the twelfth century, our time.  Or earlier.
;-)
Sally