Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 22 November 2011 09:30:14 R A Brown wrote:

> On 21/11/2011 20:47, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> 
> > On Saturday 19 November 2011 02:33:54 Jim Henry wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> I started planning such a system for one of my
> >> sketchlangs, but didn't get very far with it.  My plan
> >> was to write some amount of text in the language using
> >> an ad-hoc system, statistically analyze the corpus, and
> >> then assign the lowercase letters on the home row of
> >> the QWERTY keyboard to the most frequent syllables, the
> >> lowercase letters on the QWE
> > 
> > You mean ASD?
> 
> I understood the "home row" to mean the middle row, i.e. the
> row beginning ASD.  This would get the syllables of greatest
> frequency, then the QWE and ZXC rows the next most frequent.

Oh, I misunderstood.

>   Then repeat the procedure with upper case.
>  
> >> and ZXC rows to the next most frequent syllables, the
> >> uppercase letters on the home row to the next most
> >> frequent, etc.
> 
> An interesting way of going about things.

It reminds me of his "Build one to throw away" project:

http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/i/jimhenry1973/conlang/conlang13/intro.htm

> Of course using
> both lower and upper case give a larger syllabary (52
> symbols), which allows a greater number of phonemes.  Such a
> way of forming the syllabary would, of course, mean the
> symbols bore no relationship to their traditional alphabetic
> values.
> 
> I guess one could argue that if you're going to use the
> characters in a non-alphabetic way, you may as well forget
> their traditional values all together   ;)

One could, but that would make the orthography still a bit
more misleading than it already is; on the other hand,
[brx], with a syllabic [r], doesn't sound much like [puluʃi],
either.
 
> > I also once had the idea for such a syllabary, when I
> > experimented with an auxlang that would have only six
> > consonants (/p t k s n l/), three vowels (/a i u/) and a
> > (C)V syllable structure.
> 
> Not even /m/ ?

No!  I decided to use only nine phonemes, and chose the six
most common consonants and the three most common vowels.
In that design, /m/ had to give way for /l/.
 
> > That would mean that there were only 21 possible
> > syllables, which would allow for using the Latin alphabet
> > as a syllabary.  Alas, I never really went to designing
> > the syllabary, and soon after, I abandoned the project.
> 
> A pity

As a serious auxlang, it would have been too wrong-headed,
I think (not that I see much point in serious auxlanging
anyway - we already have Esperanto and oodles of others,
and then there's English); but perhaps I'll pick up that
conlang again later.  Alas, I currently have no plans for it.
I am more interested in diachronic naturalistic fictional
languages.
 
> > Jeff Jones uses a syllabary composed of both upper- and
> > lower-case Latin letters for his conlang 'Yemls.
> 
> Yes, he does; and his symbols are obviously chosen, like
> mine, with some reference to their traditional values:
> http://archives.conlang.info/khae/giarwon/bharghodhein.html
> 
> Using 52 characters, 'Yemls has a much richer phonemic
> inventory than Brx.  It's interesting to see how he solves
> some of the problems.  I notice he also uses _w_ to denote a
> syllable beginning with /m/; but his solution to the /n/
> series is different from mine.

Yes.  The letter values are not totally out of the ordinary,
and the [±uppercase] parameter consistently encodes vowel
height - by changing to a horizontal vowel system with just
/e/ and /o/, one could do away with it and have a serviceable
case-insensitive 26-letter syllabary.
 
> But a useful exercise in "compare and contrast"   :)
> ===============================================
> 
> On 22/11/2011 02:04, Dana Nutter wrote:
> > I never actually had a conlang for it, but once made a
> > Roman-based orthography that was somewhere between an
> > abugida and abjad. using diacritics for vowel points,
> > and <o> as the null placeholder for syllables without a
> > consonant.
> 
> Of course the Roman alphabet is ultimately derived from the
> Phoenician 21-letter abjad;

22 letters, that is.  Some did not make it into the Latin
alphabet, though.

> so one way would be to 'roll
> back' the values, as it were - tho one could not, of course,
> do that with the extras.

Indeed not.

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