Re: Fun with orthography

* Yoon Ha Lee said on 2001-10-13 23:11:44 +0200
> On Saturday, October 13, 2001, at 12:13 , taliesin the storyteller wrote:
> > Furthermore, getting rid of the comma (which shows palatalization)
> > would be nice, to say the least.
>
> Hmm. Could you reassign palatalization to the apostrophe, or do you
> want to just not have apostrophes? <pondering> Is there another
> alphabet-letter going unused that you could assign, like <j>?
Taken, for /Z/. The only regular 26-letter alphabet character that
hasn't been used for something is {w}. I've though of using {µ} though,
but the comma is even more of a modifying diacritic than the apostrophe
ever was.

> Though for a four-tone language that never went anywhere, I
> contemplated using punctuation to indicate tone:
Tone... my long vowels currently insist on being pronounced with a
higher (level) tone than the rest. Will this thing ever stop mutating?
:)

> > [..] Therefore, I've been looking for a mechanized solution, and I
> > think I have it:
>
> :-p Because I use lots of place- and people-names from Czevraqis in
> a novel-in-progress, I do have a lot of opportunity to see lots of
> partial-transliterated-text, though I agree changing everything is a
> pain.  (Thank God for search-and-replace-all.)
Regexps and sed is the one, true way.

> And I still have a few "artifacts" of older transliterations running
> around: Rekke [*eke] still has the doubled <k> for "echoed vowels"
> (i.e. when you have the same vowel before and after a consonant).
Ahh, like finding a webpage that haven't been converted to the new
morphology, how fun ;)

> Previously Rekke was accompanied by Esse [ese] and Darra [da*a] and so
> on, but Reke just looks too awful.  So the Avren dialect may end up
> getting geminate consonants--because of a spelling artifact. =^)
Why not just let it be a spelling artifact, non-phonemic orthograpies
are quite interesting (unless its English :) )


t.

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