My beef about ɨ/ɯ

[Astraios]

Maybe but they already pretend they have 24 carets when it's really just corn gold coated plastic.

Except that those would be carats.

[vec]

I use û for /ɨ/ in Imuthan. In early versions I used î but i with diacritics is not good. It's too thin. Imuthan has /i ɨ u/ for it's top vowels, i û u does the job nicely, I think. Works well with ê and ô which are used for /e o/.

[Travis B.]

I use û for /ɨ/ in Imuthan. In early versions I used î but i with diacritics is not good. It's too thin. Imuthan has /i ɨ u/ for it's top vowels, i û u does the job nicely, I think. Works well with ê and ô which are used for /e o/.

<í> is not bad, but it is probably the only case of <i> with a diacritic that looks reasonably decent.

[vec]

I use û for /ɨ/ in Imuthan. In early versions I used î but i with diacritics is not good. It's too thin. Imuthan has /i ɨ u/ for it's top vowels, i û u does the job nicely, I think. Works well with ê and ô which are used for /e o/.

<í> is not bad, but it is probably the only case of <i> with a diacritic that looks reasonably decent.

Yeah. Personally, í, ì, i, į and ı all look fine to me and I can deal with ĭ, but others I don't like. Also, a language should never have all (or even many) of those.

[Qwynegold]

[quote="cedh audmanh"]As for /ɨ ʉ/, I quite like using the IPA symbols for these, but unfortunately there's no capital version of either.[/quote]
Ɨ (U+0197) and Ʉ (U+0244). Or did you mean that they're not available for most fonts?
Gah, I missed the whole second page.

[Nortaneous]

Only three of my langs have a nonfront high unrounded vowel. Two of them use <y> and one uses <e>/<en> because of diachronic fuckery + conservative orthography.

Yeah. Personally, í, ì, i, į and ı all look fine to me and I can deal with ĭ, but others I don't like. Also, a language should never have all (or even many) of those.

I can't stand <í ì>. They're too hard to tell from <i>.

[David McCann]

Why only one vote for <ï>? It does make sense to have
front rounded: ü ö
back unrounded: ï ë
Unless, of course, you have tone, length, or stress to mark, and end up with something like Vietnamese.

Incidentally, isn't it strange that the Vietnamese don't mind writing vowels with two or three diacritics, while the Chinese can seldom be bothered with one when they write in Pinyin?

[linguoboy]

Incidentally, isn't it strange that the Vietnamese don't mind writing vowels with two or three diacritics, while the Chinese can seldom be bothered with one when they write in Pinyin?

Not at all. The functional load of that one diacritic is a tiny fraction of that for the Vietnamese diacritic set. How many minimal pairs can you find for ü vs. u?

[Tropylium⁺]

Why only one vote for <ï>? It does make sense to have
front rounded: ü ö
back unrounded: ï ë

Handy yes, but inverse marking seems ideologically somewhat suspect. Sort of like if Polish and Hungarian had a baby that used <ś z s ź> for /s z ɕ ʑ/…

[Radius Solis]

Why only one vote for <ï>? It does make sense to have
front rounded: ü ö
back unrounded: ï ë
Unless, of course, you have tone, length, or stress to mark, and end up with something like Vietnamese.

I suggested a much fuller version of this system, which I named Systematic Vowel Transcription, for inclusion in Z-SAMPA some years back. Of course Z-SAMPA itself is increasingly less used here these days, as there is turnover on the board and fewer people remember it exists at the same time that direct IPA has caught on. But SVT never caught, even back when it might have been able to serve a helpful role - it was added to the page and nobody used it thereafter, not even me, I don't know why.

Of course that's to do with transcription and not spelling, but the failure of SVT may stem from the same reasons nobody's voting for ï in this thread, whatever those may be.

[Xonen]

Why only one vote for <ï>? It does make sense to have
front rounded: ü ö
back unrounded: ï ë

Handy yes, but inverse marking seems ideologically somewhat suspect.

In Soviet Russia, inversion marks YOU?

Sort of like if Polish and Hungarian had a baby that used <ś z s ź> for /s z ɕ ʑ/…

Sort of, but not quite. Using <s ś> for /s\ s/ would serve no real purpose, and it looks confusing because it's the exact opposite of what people would expect. By contrast, using <a e i o u> for /a e i o u/ and marking other vowels with diacritics is useful because it's exactly what people normally expect. I guess you could argue that <e i o u> for /V M o u/ and <ë ï ö ü> for /e i 2 y/ would be more true to The Ideology, but at least I personally don't find that any less unnecessarily complicated; quite the opposite, in fact.

Also, "opposite frontness" is still quite easily described as a single function for the diacritic. "Opposite value of alveo-palatal or alveolar articulation", is stretching it a bit more, I think.

[finlay]

Why only one vote for <ï>? It does make sense to have
front rounded: ü ö
back unrounded: ï ë

Handy yes, but inverse marking seems ideologically somewhat suspect. Sort of like if Polish and Hungarian had a baby that used <ś z s ź> for /s z ɕ ʑ/…

But in hungarian, <sz> and <zs> are a combination of <z> and <s> - POA of the latter, voicing of the former. It does make sense. Yours wouldn't in the same way.

[Drydic]

In most of my systems I use <j y> for [j y], <j y> for when there's [j ɨ], and I'm not crazy enough to do a language with all of [j y ɨ], let alone those plus [ɯ] (though that wouldn't be as hard orthographically, just <j ü y ʉ>, or even <w> for [ɯ].) I also have a penchant for adding in [ɥ], but I generally use <ŵ> or <w> for that (and in programs where it'd be too difficult for strikethrough, just underline, which also easily works for [ɨ ʉ]; highlight + ctrl-u is just easier than hunting down the various menu or ctrl command for strikethrough.)

The Tyətrei family use <j y w w> for [dʒ j w ɥ], while the Fajau subfamily uses <c j u ts dz î û> for [c ɟ ʉ ts dz j w], because I use <ŵ w> for [ɸ β] (since those vary into voiceless and voiced labial-velar fricatives also), and with that system <y> anywhere is just out of place. A daughter might use it for [y] later, but I doubt it.

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