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Syllabicity Toggler

From:Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
Date:Monday, October 14, 2002, 20:34
I'm currently messing with yet another incarnation of the Maidzhen Klaish
(the featural script that Tairezazh is supposedly written in), and this one
may even, unlike the last one, reach the web*.

One of the innovations of this version is a diacritic I call the
'syllabicity toggler' (no, I haven't pinned down the Tairezan term yet). It
looks like a hac^ek or breve, and turns vowels into semivowels, and
consonants to syllabic consonants. Now I wonder if there's any natlang with
a similar sign, or if I've chanced on some actually original thinking (scary
thought!).

The more omniscient members of the list may recall that Standard Tairezazh
lacks both semivowels and syllabic consonants, and therefore wonder why the
script includes means for indicating them. The answer is simply that,
intrafictionally, the Maidzhen Klaish were designed as a in principle
universal script, capable of rendering any human language. Now, writing a
Caucasian or Khoi-San language with dozens and dozens of phonemes with it
would clearly be a challenge, I should think possible.

* It may be noted that about the only thing remaining from the very first
version (which's not the one some of you may be having a link too) is the
letter for /a/, which looks like a Latin capital "O".

                                                Andreas

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Joe Mondello <joemond@...>theta roles and ergativity in a fairly isolating new language [longish]