BrScB syllabic symbols (was: Back again)

On Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 07:55 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>>
[snip]

>> Yes, I'm in two minds about including number symbols.  They figure a lot
>> in
>> Lin  :)
>>
>> True, "a" is not used and is a letter, but it does seem a radical
>> departure to
>> use it to denote /nu/ or /ni/ and I wanted to traditional consonant
>> character
>> as syllabic symbols.
> I seem to recall a thread on this list about a Chinese dialect that had
> changed ni>a or possibly vice versa ...
That's right. It's given by Yuen Ren Chao in "Language and Symbolic
Systems".  The archaic Chinese /ni/, meaning "two",has become /@`/ in
modern standard Chinese (Mandarin) and /A/ in the modern Yangzhou dialect.
The changes are(in X-SAMPA):
ni -> n\z\i -> z\i -> z`1-> r\= -> @` -> a` -> A

But I don't think that's really sound precedent for using 'a' to
denote /ni/ ~ /nu/.

>> I had considered using "h" for /ni/ ~ /nu/ since at
>> least
>> it has a similar shape to "n" and the upper case H is identical to the
>> Cyrillic
>> letter for /n/.
>
> That's an even better idea.
I think so too - but would such a use of Roman 'h' be too bizarre?

Ray
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