Nice! It looks a lot more historically plausible now. That said, a couple of glyph etymologies may still need additional work (see below), and there's also a more general point:
I'm strongly in favor of having the Fáralo alphabet containing
more glyphs than strictly necessary - firstly because that'd give additional flavor, and secondly (importantly) because that'd give more letterforms to play with when creating descendant scripts. As a summary, I imagine the Fáralo alphabet to work like an alphabet in that every glyph stands for one sound, and also in that every sound of the Fáralo language can be represented more or less unambiguously, but not with a one-to-one correspondence with the phoneme inventory, instead containing a couple of variant spellings for certain sounds which may represent etymological spelling in some cases, and arbitrary tradition in others. All in all, I think we should be aiming for 35-40 letters rather than the 27½ we have now.
Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:dunomapuka wrote:
-Final /ə/ might be perceived as a variant of /a/ as opposed to other /ə/ which are mostly used to break up clusters in loanwords. If you split it up I would use the dot only for the latter, the first could be some variant of the /a/ glyph.
I'd prefer to use the same sign for all /ə/, though we could of course use a variant of
a (probably just a vertical line).
A vertical line is a neat idea. Other options would be
aunti "river" (90), giving something like <Z> or <Ƨ>, or
âka "air, wind" (22), giving something like <∂ Ꭷ ᘐ ᖙ>.
-Would also be interesting to have a separate letter for unstressed initial e-
Perhaps, though I imagine they started to write down the initial
e- soon after it appeared, which means that by the time the alphabet was invented, it was written the same as regular
e.
Since this initial /ɛ-/ is usually epenthetic, it might have been [ə] early on. /ə/ doesn't appear word-initially in Fáralo, so unstressed /ɛ-/ could even be written as schwa, while other instances of /ɛ/ would be written with the
E glyph. This would actually be my favorite option here.
-What if /b d g s š/ are written as variants of /p t k h w/ when they result from consonant mutation? Think Gaelic.
Certainly a possibility.
I like that idea a lot too. We could use turned or mirrored versions of the base letters (as with S~Z), the base letters plus a diacritic, or alternative syllable glyph sources. The first of these has the advantage that there's precedent within the script, even for indicating [+voiced], but we have lots of glyphs already that are in fact turned or mirrored versions of other letters, but unsystematically so (A~M, N~E, J~O, I~K, G~EI, H~F, B~Æ), so maybe this idea is not so workable. (Actually I'm not sure that many similarities is something we really want; maybe it would be a good idea to try and reduce them; then the variant glyph idea might work.) As for diacritics, it looks as if the script already contains a few (compare I~S~J to K~Z~O), but again it doesn't have any identifiable meaning. So maybe alternative syllables is the easiest source here, but maybe using less similar glyphs in the first place (and then having graphical space to rotate some of them) would be the most interesting way to go.
We could maybe add additional glyphs from simple *PV *TV *KI/KE *KA/KO syllables with voiceless values though, which would (at first?) be used only in word-initial position.
-I second Cedh in thinking that /iə uə/ should be separate letters derived from iN uN.
Perhaps you're right; it makes sense to analyse /iə uə/ as single units, and it'd also mean that all of the VN glyphs could be used. Though I'd like to point out that
the Fáralo grammar doesn't mention these diphthongs at all, but instead it gives the pronunciation of
ŋiəbu as ['ni ə bu], suggesting that sequences /iə/ and /uə/ actually consisted of two separate syllables. The
sample on the wiki page transcribes those sequences the same way. This all could mean that they were either actually pronounced as separate syllables (at least originally), in which case they should be written as digraphs, or that Zompist made a mistake (apart from the [n]).
These sequences are disyllabic in Fáralo, yes, but their etyma were monosyllabic in Ndak Ta, so they would originally have been written as one syllable. And since you're already using *AN *EN *ON anyway, adding *IN *UN makes a lot of sense here. (Maybe individual writers may vary whether they use single glyphs IƏ UƏ or glyph sequences I.Ə U.Ə though, or these styles vary by region?)
-/č/ from ngkai is not a good fit because the Fáralo reflex is ekéi.
EDIT: never mind the last one, I wasn't following the chronology. ngkai first gets recruited as a syllabary glyph ngki, which then reflects the palatalized pronunciation. Right?
Yep, that's right.
It might work with that chronology, but... in the Ndak Ta syllabary, /ai au/ are supposed to have been written with two consecutive glyphs, so that
ngkai would have been written NGKA.I, and the syllabic value of glyph 12 would therefore have been NGKA. Of course there's no word beginning in
ngki,
nggi, or
ngge in the entire Ndak Ta lexicon. Maybe we could invent an oryziform glyph for
ngket "wilt, wither, fade", or we could coin a phonologically suitable Ndak Ta word for a concept that we have an oryziform glyph but not a word for, e.g. "cloth, clothing" (117, might give something like <#>, <
> or a mirrored <§>), "cart" (169), "dish" (172), "friend" ("gentle", 188, might give something like <ᕰ> or <⩁> or even <⏂>), "time"/"waterclock" (197), "plow" (198, might give something like <Δ> or <⎳> or <Ц>), "wool" (199, might give something like <Щ> or <ɰ> or <Ⲿ> or <ᙕ>), "milk" (200, might give something like <π> or <ϖ> or <ıYı>), "tear(s)" (222), "channel"/"ditch" (237, might give something like <Ũ> or <Ʉ>), "straw" (254), "claw" (271, might give something like <Y> or <У>), "needle" (274, might give something like <ᖻ> or <ᖿ> or <Ⴄ> or <T>), "juice" (281).
(The same objection also applies to your glyphs for P, T, and L, but there you can still use them for Fáralo, only the intermediate syllable value would have to change from PI TI LI to PA TA LA.)
Another problematic source is your glyph for B, because
bwai "star" would usually have been KU.A.I in the Ndak syllabary. Better sources IMO would be
pon "island" (62),
pungwa "nose" (84),
pap "shield" (97), or
pumâ "smoke" (100); the first three of these have nice and fairly simple glyphs in Oryziform already.