zompist bboard

I was reading an old thread made before Elcaril was completed, but there

Zompist wrote:Just like it looks. The vowels are pretty much as in Barakhinei (except that none of them are rounded). Ch and j are as in English; ph is just [f]; q is the same uvular q as in Arabic or Verdurian. This sentence doesn't happen to have any implosives in it.

Is the ph an f then? Or is it bilabial?

vegfarandi wrote:I was reading an old thread made before Elcaril was completed, but there

Zompist wrote:Just like it looks. The vowels are pretty much as in Barakhinei (except that none of them are rounded). Ch and j are as in English; ph is just [f]; q is the same uvular q as in Arabic or Verdurian. This sentence doesn't happen to have any implosives in it.

Is the ph an f then? Or is it bilabial?

[ph] changed after that was written. It's a bilabial fricative, as it says in the grammar.

OK. But why didn't you use f at that point?

At what point? If you mean when I posted that snippet to the board, it was because of internal consistency-- all the fricatives were transliterated as -h digraphs.

Yes, that's what I meant. Now I get it. When I was doing my first languages, I was always in trouble trying to keep them all consistant in spelling, especially since they were supposed to be used in my book and it's confusing when c is [S] on one place but [k] at another and [c] at yet another so I changed them all. You seem to have no trouble with keeping them very different when transliterated.

Ah, I see what you're after now. It's a purposeful thing. Transliterations of Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Quechua all look different; for Almea, I want the same feeling that the various cultures are very different.

On the other hand, I try to avoid gratuitous variation. The transliterations have good reasons to be the way they are. I don't (say) use <c> differently in two languages just because it looks cool.

As the thing Tolkien said! One of the reason Quenya etc. look so beautiful is because of the Latinesque transliteration. Had he used a lot of diacritical marks and such it would have gotten a different feel, at least written.