Re: Conlang orthography (was Re: Orthographic reform (was Re: Difficulty))

[Padraic Brown <pbrown@POLARIS.UMUC.EDU>]

On Sun, 19 Jul 1998, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Now, a conlang twist:
>
> Does anyone have silent letters in their language's orthography, or
> irregular spellings, or simply complex orthography?  I suspect that the

Yes, yes and yes (for Kernu).  For example, the oblique endings are (in
most dialects) silent -e or -es: la ngasse is pronounced something like
/la~ ngas/; y chasses is /i xas/.  The past participles are all pronounced
/'-u/, even though there are sing./pl. masc./fem. written distinctions:
        m.s.    m.pl.           f.s.    f.pl.
        tostu   tostus          tostue  tostues
        /tostu/ /tostu/         /tostu/ /tostu/

As in "yen kes tostu, favori", one toasted cheese, please; or "oech chatti
tostues e chastues", eight toasted cats, stuffed and roasted.  Don't
worry, it's actually pork.  Honest.  :-)

The silent letters were originally pronounced.  There are dialects that
still pronounce: /la~ ngasa/ rather than /la~ ngas/.

Frequently i & y are interchanged in nouns or verbs: y thurris / y thurris
"the towers".  Sometimes e & y: eo / yo "I".  O & u are often confused: il
turcs v. il torcs.  Somewhere around I've got a chart indicating various
grades of vowel degradation that are possible -- u can degrade to o which
can degrade to @.  This is a function of accent primarily; and also
whether one is speaking amongst friends or before a judge.  One must
_always_ speak correctly before the Law.

There's a subtle difference between c, ck and cc: all are pronounced /k/,
but are used in different environments.  cc, a hardened c, in the vicinity
of a weak vowel (i or e)  will "protect" the /k/ sound from becoming /s/:
le ndorcce is pronounced /le ndork/ rather than /le ndors/.  ck is a bit
harder to track down, as it has in the past been used to indicate
hardening of c, a plain c or sometimes for other reasons no longer
remembered.

A recent orthographic reform has changed final -ou (nom. pl.) into -i.
The -ou group has always been pronounced /i/, but through various spelling
shifts through the centuries, the spelling has drifted somewhat from the
expected.  This same reform also (supposedly) kills the obl. sing. ending;
but no one in the country has paid attention to that yet. ;-)

Padraic.

> celtic-roman conlangs probably have a fairly complex orthography.  As
> for me, W-ansansanu is totally, 100%, phonemic.  However, there are
> sometimes little peculiarities in the spelling, usually fairly
> predictable.  The native orthography is syllabic (actually, the
> syllables consist of a character representing the consonant(s) - the
> two-consonant ones (like _san_) are derived from a ligature of two
> independant characters - plus a diacritic for the vowel).  However,
> there are sometimes small deviations from this principle.  For this, I
> use the apostrophe in my romanization (mostly only in a dictionary,
> tho.  In normal writing, it would tend to be ignored).  Example:
> ti-tal'lanpinu (goddess), consisting of the characters ti, tal, lan, pi,
> & nu.  Ordinarily, llan would be a single character, but in this case
> tal- is a prefix (meaning "one who"), while _lanpi_ is a verb meaning
> "give" (the modern form is _lapi_, penultimate syllables became open
> long ago, thus the _n_ was dropped, but was retained in the compound,
> since it wasn't penultimate), literally, "one who gives".  Another
> example is su-tal'ansakalnas'sinu, which contains two exceptions,
> _tal'an_ indicates _tal_ followed by _an_ (as opposed to the expected
> _ta_ followed by _lan_), and _nas_ followed by _si_, as opposed to the
> expected _na_ + _ssi_.  Again, the tal- is a prefix, thus it tends to
> retain its form, while the _-nas'si-_ was originally _-nasti-_, but /ti/
> is pronounced [tSi], and /si/ is [Si], so /asti/ is [aStSi], which
> became [aS:i].

Neat stuff, here!

>
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