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Revised Zharranh page

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Sunday, February 8, 2004, 4:50
I finally updated the Zharranh page to replace the old SIL IPA
characters with Unicode, and changed the spelling of the Zharranh words
to the new system (although I left the spelling of the name "Zharranh"
alone).

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/Zharranh.html

I decided to go ahead and use the letters with retroflex hooks, since
the dot below was too easy to confuse with the comma below that I'm
using for palatal sounds. For [j\], I'm using j-circumflex, firstly
because there isn't a precomposed z-comma, and secondly because it
doesn't sound like any kind of z at all. For the Zharranh phoneme that's
variously pronounced [kw] or [p], I kept the spelling "q". Many
languages are going to have phonemes like this that don't fit the
spelling system, but IPA wouldn't be any better for this.

I'm using t with stroke and d with stroke for the dental stops, but
since [T] and [D] are allophones of these phonemes, I could just as
easily have spelled them "th" and "dh". Are there any languages that
have /t_d/ and /T/, or /d_d/ and /D/, as distinct phonemes, and still
need to distinguish them from the alveolar stops /t_-/ and /d_-/? I'm
thinking that I might as well use "th" and "dh" for dental stops
whenever they're distinct from alveolar stops.

Reply

Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>