Re: Some more idea about modern Vulcan writing
Rob Zook 
Thu, 20 Nov 1997 12:32:54 -0600

At 10:03 AM 11/20/97 -0600, you wrote:
>>> kya                           kaia?
>>> kyani                         kaiani?
>>> Kya'shin                      kaia'cin?
>>kya = kja
>>
>>The last line was her reply. Since as you said, she has never posted
>>anything using your transliteration method. I assume she means the
>>j in the Lexicon which was listed as meaning the sound [dj] in "judge".
>>which would make it kdja by your transliteration method.
>
>We have located the zone of our misunderstanding. In "Vulcan Lexicon," 
>the signs are mapped as follows:
>    zh -  [as in] measure...
>    dzh - [d]+[zh] pronounced as one voiced sound.
>    j -   [as in] yolk, yes.
>and I modified those,
>
>    OLD<zh>  ->  NEW<j>
>    OLD<dzh> ->  NEW<dj>
>    OLD<j>   ->  NEW<y>

Ack! Your completely right. So in the new system we would still spell 
it kya.

>>What seems really strange is the etymological relationship between
>>kya and kaiidth, if it really should be spelled kja. It would almost
>>make more sense for kya to sound like [kaia], then it's relationship to
>>kaiidth would seem obvious.
>
>Oh, I definitely think NEW<kaia> or NEW<kya> makes more sense than 
>either NEW<kja> or NEW<kdja>. j and y are close enough that some 
>relationship is possible, of course. j spontaneously appeared in French 
>and got written down using a sign that had meant y -- and which still 
>has that meaning in German. But a more likely situation would be between
>
>        kajidth   and   kya
>
>where some rule deleted the "a," invoking another rule transforming j->y.
>Morphology can be..,interesting.

Yes, that would make sense. However, y, i, and j are all closely related
so, now that I see where my original confusion stems from - I think the 
kya and kaiidth relationship makes perfect sense.

Maybe they come from an older dialect of Vulcan which had a compound word
forming rule which mutates the vowel sounds. So ya -> ai in a compound
word, led from the root word kya mutating to the kai in the compound
word kaiidth.

Or, kya could have come from either a different dialect from that of
kaiidth, and had different morphemic rules. Perhaps the newer dialect 
stole the compound form, maybe kyaidth?, but had no rule to allow the
combination of kyai, so they mutated the word to kaiidth, which
did fit into the morphology of newer dialect.

Rob Z.
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