From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri May 30 2008 - 17:14:34 CDT
Lorna_Priest@sil.org wrote:
> "André Szabolcs Szelp" <a.sz.szelp@gmail.com> wrote on 05/30/2008 02:40:15
AM:
> > While "usual" letters (q, etc.) do arguably have nothing to do with
> > your research, Karl's proposal of adding the period-designated
> > glottals does seem to make sense, as it's a related convention as in
> > using punctuation mark(s) for glottals.
>
> yes. if nothing else, it's very interesting! People have done some wierd
things to represent glottals!
Not just glottals, but various consonnants unpronouncable in usual European
languages written with the Latin script, and not even approximated but kept
mute. This also concerns other sounds like clicks.
But even with pronouncable consonnants various orthographies are used, look
for example:
q, qu, kh, x, gh, ch, gu, c'h, r, rr, rrh, rh, j, zh, l·l, dl, ll, lh, ...
The orthography is largely influenced by the phonology, i.e. the perception
of sounds considered as "equivalent" in each language, but certainly not by
phonetics (because most languages have various accents and phonetic
realizations of the "same" letters).
A good news is that most languages have also made evolutions to their
orthographies, in order to adapt either to the evolution of the phonology,
to the growing borrowed words from foreign languages, the influence of other
dominant languages, or to technical limitations.
At least thetechnical limitations that were experienced in the early day of
evolution to computing environments or even mechanical typesetting, are
starting to disappear. The ambiguous use of punctuation will not get the
favor of the public that are more aware of the existence of other better
characters that are already supported; the bad news is that such evolution
is progressive and takes considerable time in comparison to the development
cycles in the computing industry that constantly generates huge amount of
already encoded texts (that no one is really willing to convert now).
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