Re: A Transcription Revision Proposal Saul Epstein Thu, 1 May 1997 13:01:16 -0500 From: Rob Zook Subject: Re: A Transcription Revision Proposal > This may be common on the net, I know this method seems popular > on TolkLang. Do these characters come thru OK to everyone: > > a i m s z > > 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. Well, those are usually used to indicate stress, but there's no reason we couldn't use them for our purposes. Especially since our two sets of vowels don't really differ by length anyway. The "real" length diacritic is a horizontal line superscript directly over the vowel. The real question is what those characters look like on each of our screens. If no one participating in this discussion has trouble receiving such characters, I will celebrate the dawning of a new age. > Too bad the greek characters don't show up well, we could > use little deta and theta for dh and th. Only if we agree that the erstwhile and are fricatives. If we do, and the accented vowels show up, there's no reason we couldn't use <~> for and

for . Other than being extra work to type... > But we might use > q for the "ny" sound. If it's transmissible, like the others. > 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. I would expect it to be phonoLOGICal, myself. > The only downside to phonetic lettering I can > come up with - number of symbols to memorize. Another downside is that phonetic spelling disguises the underlying relatedness of words. > 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 > memorize even a couple of hundred phonetic letters. I have this vague recollection of the TNG two-part episode, "Reunification," and Spock referring to the writing system as a syllabary, which would make it much like Japanese. -- from Saul Epstein liberty uit net