Hi, David! I was watching the TAOLI YouTube series (Ep.6 I think) and somehow ended up on Zhyler's orthography page. Though I really like the look of it and how it works, I was hoping you could explain why there are three separate letters that show up as "n" in the romanization. Thanks!
The phoneme /n/ has some regular correspondences in Zhyler. Specifically, /n/ becomes [ɲ] before palatals, while it becomes [ŋ] before velars. This isn’t changed in the romanization because there aren’t ready Roman characters for [ɲ] and [ŋ]. In Zhyler’s orthography, though, there are special letters for those two sounds. The corresponding characters in the romanization, then, are the same, and only show up in certain circumstances. Thus, something that’s spelled like this in the Zhyler orthography (using roman letter correspondences):
aŋka
Will be spelled like this in the romanization:
anka
Because there’s no letter <ŋ> in our own romanization. It’s unnecessary to introduce it because the change is predictable, and very familiar to English speakers (notice that the sound [ŋ] is spelled in words like “ink” and “sunk”). Adding <ŋ> would needlessly complicate the romanization.
Hopefully that explains it! If not, let me know.
