Thursday, May 18, 2017

By George She's Got It, She's Really Got It!

A correspondent writes:
Rex, is there a compact list for pronounciation, first row the letter, second row the IPA character(s)? E.g. as at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php...

And he's right, I need to make one, for a number of reasons. But before I do, I have a question. There's the IPA, where you spell the "ch" sound that Tceqli begins with as . IPA has a bunch of characters like that stretched-out "s" that aren't readily available on your keyboard. I've seen that same sound spelled /tS/ between two slashes like that. I assume this is a system designed for people who can't, for whatever reason, make the offbeat symbols like ʃ.  Anybody know? And know what the system's called, and where I can find a link to it?

Another question. How does this sound to everybody?:

You can symbolize just about any sound you want with Tceqli's 26 letters — 25 letters that have one phoneme each associated with them, and then the X, which is used to modify the other letters, mainly for foreign sounds. 

tx = th as in THin
hx = ch as in BaCH
ux = ü as in Über

You also have the option of replacing letter-followed-by-x with any version of that letter with a diacritic of any kind:

tx > t
hx > ħ
ux > ü (of course)

But that's sophisticated stuff for the future.

And then we have schwa, which won't be a basic Tceqli sound, but which i figure will be in the names of most Tceqli lettersa; ah, buh, shuh, duh, etc.,, and of course in foreign words and names.

The same correspondent writes:

In the Unified Latin Alphabet 2016 (ULA 2016) schwa is <y>. In IPA /y/ is a vowel and using <y> as vowel, allows easy pronounciation of international words like Yttrium.

Letter <y> = IPA /j/ would then be <j> = /j/, i.e. less deviation from IPA. Beside in IPA this is used in several Germanic and Slavic languages languages.

Then Tceqli would need something for /ʒ/. ULA 2016 uses <q>.

Then Tceqli needs something for /ŋ/. Maybe use the modifier here, i.e. Tcenxli.

I really don't want to make all those changes, but y for schwa is tempting. But if y is used for that, it can't be used as the semivowel it represents in current Tceqli. For that I'd have to use j (and then represent /Z/ with a ʒ and /dZ/ with dʒ. Or just go to Russian and use ж. Or, I could replace semivowel y with a simple i, and change the rule so that i next to another vowel behaves as a semivowel.

The trouble with this last is that you can't have a word like dia pronounced DEE-ah. It would be DYAH. One way around that would be to have the i-becomes-semivowel rule, but also have a way to short-circuit it by saying that a hyphen separates vowels and causes them to be pronounced separately. So dia would be DYAH and di-a would be DEE-ah.

Do give me your input on all of this.


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