Re: A Transcription Revision Proposal
Rob Zook 
Thu, 01 May 1997 10:32:19 -0500

At 08:26 PM 4/30/97 -0500, you wrote:
>I'd like to suggest the following alternative notation for the
>transcription of Vulcan, adapted from the ZC:
>
>VOWELS
>
>ii i				u uu
>	ee		oo
>	e		o
>		^
>		^^
>	aa		a
>
>i	pit (Brit English)		ii	mean (Brit English)
>u	put (Brit English)		uu	prune (Brit English)
>e	set (Brit English)		ee	prenez (French)
>o	not (Brit English)		oo	fault (Brit English)
>^	but (Brit English)		^^	sir (Brit English)
>a 	patte (French)			aa	?

This may be common on the net, I know this method seems popular
on TolkLang. Do these characters come thru OK to everyone:

=E1 =E9 =ED =F3 =FA

If so perhaps we could use these to represent the long vowels.
If I'm not mistaken, this is one way of doing it. Unless I've
got the marks the wrong direction.


>ZC says "Nasalization is indicated by a tilde, e,g., e~." Let me say
>that I don't like the way working with ASCII requires that
>diacritical marks be put beside a symbol instead of above or below:

Well, if we all used Eudora 3,0 Pro we could mess around with=20
linguistic fonts. Probably not practical, but it would make this more=20
understandable.


>CONSONANTS
>
>p	put (English)		c	shoot (English)
>b	but (English)		j	measure (English)
>f	folk (English)		y	yolk (English)
>v	veal (English)		rr	sparrow (Am English)
>wh	white (English)		n~	man~ana (Spanish), mignon (French)
>w	wise (English)		k	cat (English)
>whl	NA				g	go (English)
>m	man (English)		x	loch (Scot Gaelic), bach (German)
>t	top (English)		ng	hang (English)
>d	door (English)		q	qur'an (Arabic)
>th					'	qur'an (Arabic)
>dh					h	hut (English)
>s	serum (English)	=09
>z	zero (English)		ts	tse-tse [English (sort of)]
>l	logic (English)		tc	church (English)
>r	perro (Spanish)		dj	jewel (English)
>n	not (English)		ks	lax (English)

Too bad the greek characters don't show up well, we could
use little deta and theta for dh and th. But we might use
=F1 for the "ny" sound.

>Of course, if we agree that our transcription has little if anything
>to do with Vulcan writing, we can designate upper-case letters as
>having different values than lower-case, eliminating the need for
>diacritics all together.

Regardless, of how what method of transcription we use, it does
not seem logical to me for the Vulcan writing system to not
be phonetic. The only downside to phonetic lettering I can
come up with - number of symbols to memorize. However, that
does not seem much of a downside, since Chinese and Japanese
use many more symbols in their writing systems. It does not
seem like an outrageous idea then for a Vulcan child to=20
memorize even a couple of hundred phonetic letters.



Rob=20