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(#^*&ing HTML e-mail!) > As some of you know, I recently retired ... Congrats. (Is there a Ceqli word for that?) > ... I have time to devote to Ceqli that I didn't before. My current "unemployed" status is doing that for me. Unfortunately the lack of dinero makes it hard to have any real fun so I'm able to put time into my projects too. > I know I've said this before, but I'd like to baseline _something_. That's a lie I keep telling myself about Sasxsek, but I always end up finding some core feature to change "for the better". But you are right, at some point you just need to start locking things down. > First, the orthography. I know you may not like this, but I think the orthography is just fine the way it is. > I've been torn between the handiness of letting 'c' represent /tS/ on the one > hand, and the symmetry and elegance of the Loglan system, where all affricates > are considered two phonemes. I'm ready to move towards the elegance system. > I like for, as much as possible, the language to be _transparent_, and, in a > small but significant way, the revealing of two phonemes where the system > now masks them as one contributes to that. > The alphabet as is: > ... > C as in CHin I say don't change it. > J as in pleaSure, French Je Leaving this alone is fine, but I favor changing it to /dZ/ which seems to be more popular (English, Arabic, Italian, etc.). /Z/ can still be an alternative. > Q as in siNG I say leave this as is too. > R as in RoaR (Midwestern American or Mandarin preferred, but any 'r' sound will > do.) Good choice. > X as in SHoe Fine. > What I want to do here is eliminate the C as /tS/ and instead represent it as > either 'tc' or 'tx'. I don't think there's a lot to say for either side. The > tc is familiar to Loglan/Lojban people, but not much of anybody else. The tx > would be familiar (sort of) to Portuguese, > Pinyin, LFN users. I don't consider Pinyin to be a good example because it's really only used for Romanizations and L2 Chinese students so you can't expect anyone Chinese speakers to recognize it. Loglan and Lojban are also not widely known to the public so I wouldn't give them too much weight either. But <x> for /S/ is not only in Portuguese but Catalan and Basque, so there is some precedent. More than for C anyway, whose most common uses are /k/ /s/ /ts/ or /tS/ depending on language. > Another consideration is that this will make the alphabet 25 letters, leaving out > either c or x. Which would be best to leave out? And if we have that extra > letter, can anybody think of a role for it? I keep thinking it could be a > schwa, but given schwa-buffering, that's probably a bad idea. Another Idea is > that the extra letter could be used to indicate non-Ceqli sounds. tx (or tc) = > /T/, that sort of thing. Reactions? I still like the idea of keeping a single letter for /tS/ because as far as Ceqli is concerned this is a single phoneme. As far as the schwa goes, it depends on whether the schwa is phonemic or not. If it's truly part of the Ceqli phoneme inventory then I would say assign a letter to it, but if it's just an optional epenthetic that won't be spoken unless necessary then I'd say don't bother. If there is going to be a /@/ then I'm sure most know what letter I like. There's no reason to use all the letters in the alphabet. If you have 25 phonemes, then use 25 letters.