Aug 9
A 15th-century alphabet designed by tracing the human mouth—each letter a visual diagram of how your tongue, teeth, and lips produce that exact sound.
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A 15th-century alphabet designed by tracing the human mouth—each letter a visual diagram of how your tongue, teeth, and lips produce that exact sound.
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I've been stagnant for a long time, i'm getting busy because of the homework I get, i'm also doing a linguistic study on the Balunod script:
I wonder if we can tell about the creators of some language writing systems based on the direction the writing goes.
For example, if languages that write right to left were created by lefties because the ink wouldn't get smudged as they wrote.
' ’ ‘ ʻ ꜥ
I appreciate that unicode had to encode the various apostrophes and quotation marks and raised commas separately, but it's very annoying when you're trying to use the search or find function in a document and ‹'› isn't showing any results because you're actually looking for ‹’›, or when the word processor dynamically updates your apostrophe to what it thinks you need, like no, the Afrikaans indefinite article is in fact ’n not ‘n !!
and while we're at it, Hawaiʻi uses the apostrophe-like letter ʻokina, which in some fonts looks like a ‹‘› but is pronounced as a glottal stop, like the sound in the Arabic word Qur’an— no not *Qur‘an because the ‹‘› represents the pharyngeal ‘ayin sound in Semitic languages, sometimes written as ‹3› (not to be confused with the Ancient Egyptian ‹Ꜣ› which in Later periods was pronounced as a glottal stop). Egyptian transliteration uses the ‹ꜥ› for the pharyngeal sound as in ꜥnḫ (‘ankh) "life", and no they're not interchangeable, for example in Classical Hebrew ’im means "if" whereas ‘im means "with" and writing either as 'im is unhelpful.
Proto‑Sinaitic inscriptions could rewrite history, forcing us to reconsider who invented the alphabet.
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i really love charts of writing systems. and this chart of the modi script is so beautiful
Suppose one were to design an alphabet. In it, the letters for the k sound in kite and the g sound in good are nearly identical, as if they’re variations of each other
Would this make sense?
Yes, those are very similar letters
No, but it’s fine. It’d be like d p q and b being unrelated yet looking the same
No, it’d be confusing
I feel like pinyin is needlessly confusing, and frankly wade-giles transcription is as well, and it's all because of the retroflex-affricate intersection
Mandarin plosives have an aspiration distinction rather than voicing, and both systems handle this in an oké way, though I prefer pinyin and it is by far the most popular system these days. if I were doing a WG-style system, I'd replace the apostrophes with <h>
/p, pʰ/ = PY <b, p> and WG <p, p'>
/t, tʰ/ = PY <d, t> and WG <t, t'>
/k, kʰ/ = PY <g, k> and WG <k, k'>
then we get to the fricative-affricate trios,
Dent. /s, ts, tsʰ/ = PY <s, z, c> and WG <s, ts, ts'>
Retro. /ʂ, tʂ, tʂʰ/ = PY <sh, zh, ch> and WG <sh, ch, ch'>
Palat. /ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ/ = PY <x, j, q> and WG <hs, ch, ch'>
and here pinyin is just misleading. I actually quite enjoy <q> aesthetically for a "ch-like" sound, but if we're trying to use single letters for everything, firstly, why ? and secondly, using digraphs only for the retroflexes,, moreover the second letter being <_h> but it's not for aspiration, is a Really Weird Choice. and WG doesn't even bother to distinguish the retroflexes so that's not an option.
I like the pinyin-style "pseudo-voicing" transcription for plosives, but I do like the idea of using <_h> for the affricates in the culmær system. that is inconsistent, yes, but it feels more intuitive
dental looks better than <s, dz, ts>
retroflex <ś, tś, tśh> ... or perhaps we use <x, tx, txh> here to avoid diacritics for some reason, though it is suboptimal for people coming from pinyin which I don't want to disregard as a design criterion
palatal <c, tc, tch> or <j, tj, tjh>, maybe even <c, tj, tch> ? the <c, j> feel good as palatals because IPA, but again we've got the pinyin issue. and it's a real pity to lose the <q> here
it's actually much more difficult to redesign this in a satisfying way than anticipated, so much more tricky ...