tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jul 17 17:55:48 2004
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Re: canon pIqaD
- From: "QeS lagh" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: canon pIqaD
- Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 10:55:09 +1000
- Bcc:
jIghItlhpu':
>On a more serious note, the fact that Klingon syllables are very limited in
>terms of consonant clusters makes me think that a CV syllabary might be
>more
>likely for Klingon than anything else.
jangpu' Philip:
>OTOH, Klingon seems to show a strong preference for closed syllables
>(i.e. CVC), so either you'll need a lot of viramas to cancel out the
>inherent vowel of a CV syllabogram used as the final -C in a syllable,
>or a set of simple C grams, or use a CVC syllabary instead.
Just to take some examples, Cree, Inuktitut, Ainu and Classic Maya all use
CV syllabaries, but have substantial numbers of closed syllables (Classic
Maya actually has a strong preference for CVC, in much the same way as
Klingon does). They all have their own devices for negating final vowels.
jangtaH:
>A CVC syllabary would need many, many different characters, but it's
>what Yi does, for example (though I can imagine that the final -p -t -x
>shown in the Unicode names are not consonantal codas but tone marks).
That's true. Are there many other examples of CVC syllabaries? That's the
only reason I thought a CV syllabary would be more likely; they are simply
more prevalent (among Terran languages, at least).
jIghItlhtaH:
>Of course, we might be treated to something completely alien and bizarre if
>pIqaD ever appears. Like two separate characters mapping to each sound, or
>something equally strange.
jangtaH Philip:
>Have a look at Thai before you dismiss it as strange; there you can have
>several characters mapping to the same sound. Or even English: both 'c'
>and 'k' are used for the /k/ sound.
But not at the same time. You misunderstand what I meant. What I meant was
having every sound mapped by a *group* of two characters.
To take an arbitrary example, the word {pob} "body hair" might be mapped to,
say, 197410 - where {p} is mapped to the two characters /19/, {o} to /74/
and {b} to /10/. The system I had had in mind was one character for point of
articulation and one for manner, so the symbol /1/ actually stands for
"labial", /9/ for "voiceless stop" and /0/ for "voiced stop". I'm willing to
bet even Thai doesn't do anything like that regularly. :)
QeS lagh
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