Re: A Transcription Revision Proposal Rob Zook Thu, 01 May 1997 15:42:03 -0500 At 01:01 PM 5/1/97 -0500, Saul wrote: >From: Rob Zook >Subject: Re: A Transcription Revision Proposal > >> 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. Well, I saw those used in one linguistic book to represent "long" vowels. But personally I don't care one way or the other. >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. Well, judging by how those letters came back to me in your reply, I'd say any celebration would seem premature >;-| >> 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... Well, I suppose you could use them to represent an asperated t and d, but I was simply refering to the convention I've seen in most if not all the linguistic books I've read in the past two months. In which t hey represent the voiceless dental fricative in "_th_igh" with a little theta, and the voiced dental fricative like in "_th_e", with either a delta or what looks like a unical d with a cross thru the stem. >> But we might use >> q for the "ny" sound. > >If it's transmissible, like the others. Evidently not. >> 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. Very punny. >> 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. How does it do that? >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. That seems not too disimilar to the kind of phonetic spelling I meant. Rob