--- On Sun, 6/5/11, And Rosta <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: And Rosta <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [CONLANG] Sorting ash (was: Re: sorting thorn
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Sunday, June 5, 2011, 1:03 PM
> Padraic Brown, On 05/06/2011 04:06:
> > --- On Fri, 6/3/11, And Rosta<[log in to unmask]> 
> wrote:
> >> Livagian romanization dates from classical times
> and uses ash as a
> >> separate letter, but I don't know where it sorts.
> My hunch is that
> >> it would sort after A, but that kind of disrupts
> the opening ABCD
> >> order that feels to me like a kind of universal,
> rising above local
> >> variations. Another possibility would be putting
> it after Z, but
> >> that too disrupts the panroman A...Z pattern.
> >
> > That seems a bit English biased to me.
> 
> As Michael replied, it's Latin biased, and this is the
> Latin alphabet.

Understood from reading below.

> > Greek and Semitic and Slavic don't have an "ABC"
> pattern - they have
> > ABG.
> 
> At some pertinent level of abstraction they do all start
> ABCD, don't they? 

Yes. Except for those that don't! ;)

> It would be easier to make the point if
> there were conventional symbols ornames that generalized
> across the cognate letters.
> 
> >Their last letters aren't Z either. Greek's at least is
> omega.
> > Russian ends on YA and Hebrew on T. Icelandic and
> Polish both insert
> > an A-like letter after A. Latvian too.
> 
> The question I was groping around was: Given that the roman
> alphabet has an intrinsic order (i.e. orderedness is one of
> its properties), is "begins AB" more fundamental to its
> essential identity than "ends with Z"?

Interesting. I don't see the "order" itself as an intrinsic property of an
alphabet. As far as I'm concerned, ABCDEFG and CPENDLS (plus the remaining
19 letters) *are* the English alphabet. The English alphabet is a set of
26 particular letters.

If you view order as an intrinsic property to an alphabet, then I would
say that "CPENDLS" a) can NOT be the English alphabet and b) "begins
with AB" and "ends with Z" are equally fundamental to the nature of the
English alphabet. Because, if you put the Z anywhere else, you no longer
have the intrinsic property of particular order.

I see the current order as more a matter of ancient tradition and present
time pragmatics -- files systems, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc. are 
all alphabetised ABC and not CPE. We got it from our forbears, and
aren't about to change it now. But there is nothing inherently "English"
(or "Roman" even) about the order of letters.

> > I see no reason whatsoever why Livagian must maintain
> "ABC" as the
> > first three letters of its romanization scheme! I vote
> for whatever
> > makes the most sense *for Livagian*.
> 
> But that's exactly what I'm trying to decide! When the
> Livagians were adopting the roman alphabet in the early
> centuries CE, they decided they needed the existing
> 23letters plusÆ. But whereabouts in the alphabet did they
> putÆ?

If they're borrowing the Roman alphabet at such an early date, I think
A AE B C could still be argued, but A B .. Z AE is also possible.

> >> And yet another possibility would be to place it
> in the position
> >> otherwise occupied by a letter unused by Livagian,
> but Livagian
> >> uses all 23 letters of Latin (plus ash). So: where
> does ash sort in
> >> Livagian?
> >
> > My vote is for A AE B C.
> 
> Would that have been your vote if you were voting two
> millennia ago?

Two millennia ago!? I think I must have missed a memo somewhere? I guess 
it would be helpful to know the particulars of this "romanisation scheme"! 
I had thought you were devising a modern scheme, not an ancient one.

I'm hazarding the guess then, that this is to be a conhistorical
romanisation, not a "real world" romanisation? In other words, you're
playing the part of a (presumably) Latin speaking scholar who is
studying Livagian and trying to render its sounds into a Classical /
Silver Age Latin sound system and alphabet? Or are you playing the part of
a Livagian scholar who is adapting a foreign bunch of symbols to the
sounds of his own language? The answer to that question might be the
most important answer in this discussion!

> > I've never used ash as a separate letter, but if I
> did, would probably
> > put it second after A. You could certainly put it
> after Z -- along with
> > yuzz and quan and thnad. It would be in good company!
> >
> > As for thorn and wynn, I have usually put them after T
> and W respectively
> > (when I've wynn as a separate letter from W).
> 
> Wynn after U/V/W makes sense if it's seen as a version of
> U/V or W.

I can no longer recall why I had kept W and wynn in the same alphabet.

Sometimes I used to just use it as a "fancy" W -- like for a chapter or
section initial. Sometimes it may have represented a different derivation
of the sound [w]. E.g., Latin vs. Germanic origins.

> I'm not sure why thorn should be seen as a version
> of T, tho.

I never thought of it as a version of T. 

> I'm thinking, in this discussion, of historically
> plausible alphabetical orders, not of contemporaneously most
> intuitive ones.

Alright -- that's good to know, if a bit late!

Kindly disregard my last email!

Honestly, then, I think the questions boil down to how Latin scholars
felt about the alphabetic order back in the first century, and what
attitudes the Livagian scholars brought into this contact. Would they
have cared about Latin traditions and usage? Would they have respected
such usage? Would they have imitated it slavishly or would they have
innovated.

I can't answer those questions for the Livagians! I can only answer for
my own conlangs.

> --And.

Padraic