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On 17/05/06, Peter Collier <petecollier@hidden.email> wrote:
Thing is, I can't imagine how best to transcribe a word-initial velar fricative (other than the Swiss <kch_>, which just looks too non-roman) - and I have plenty of them. In other positions I used <ch>, which seems fine to me (not too far away for example fom the French <ch> for /S/). I've thought of maybe <c>, or <c-cedilla>, or even <hch> (c.f. German <sch> and <tsch>), but they don't quite seem to fit. Maybe just use <ch> in initial position too, althouh that looks 'wrong' to me. Does anyone have any idea how those poor mediaeval monks, schooled in classical latin, might have tried to write an initial /x/ ?
In modern Spanish, the uvular fricative is written with j, and x before all vowels, and g before i and e, but these letters didn't originally indicate that sound, of course. You'd have to think about the broader scope of your intended language.
And then that led me to wondering to what extent the romance languages' orthographies tend towards being conservative, (in preserving the original latin to some extent or another). Pronununciation in Castillian has moved quite some way from latin, but the orthography is much more 'latin-conservative' than say, Italian, which while perhaps phonologically closer to latin, has changed it's spelling a lot (e.g. Castillian <qué> vs italian <che>). What are your thoughts? Stamp your mark on the nascent Northern Romance languages! Should they be more latin looking, or more germanic!?
I prefer things look more Latin looking, mainly because it's feels much more "right" to me.