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Mark G skrev:
Continuing on with my series of disjointed questions: One of the phonemes in my current romlang is /OE/ (open front unrounded)... I know in a few Germanic languages, and possibly even French, it's sometimes an allophone of /oe/, but I've discarded the idea of French 'oeu' or even the more appropriate 'oau' so as to avoid confusion (because the language also has a few polyphthongs), and I really don't want to resort to "ö" for aesthetic reasons (or actually, *synaesthetic* reasons; "ö" simply doesn't look like /OE/ sounds to me). Obviously, this is a much more common allophone than phoneme in most cases, so it isn't often represented as such-- any ideas how I might be able to represent in a way that's a little more original but not beyond convincing?
First of all: have a look at <http://www.theiling.de/ipa/> for the system of ascii-transliterating IPA current on thislist (and other offshoots of CONLANG). It is more convenient to write [\&] and [9] since the diphthongs
[OE] and [oe] do actually occur in languages... The question how you should write /6\/ (open front rounded) depends quite a bit on two factors, namely how you write /9/ (half-open front rounded) and [2] (half-closed front rounded) and your position wrt digraphs/polygraphs vs. diacritics generally and how you use them. If you use <oe> for /9/ then perhaps you can use <eo> for /&\/. If this clashes with a diphthong you may perhaps use <ëo> for the diphthong or a sequence of two vowels which are not a diphthong. If you have nothing against diacritics and you use é and è similar to how they are used in French then you might use something like Front Back Unrounded Rounded Rounded Half-closed é ő ó Half-open e ö o Open è ȍ ò If you want to stay within Latin-1 you may use ö ô õ to get three varieties of non-closed front rounded vowels. Swedish dialect spelling uses the circumflex as a general laxing-centralizing diacritic so that you get â î ô û ŷ for [a] [I] [&\] or [3\] [8] [Y] versus a i o u y for [A] [i] [o] or [O] [u\] [y] If you are on Windows I suggest you download BabelMap <http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html> and some suitable Unicode fonts (look at <http://wiki.frath.net/Help:Free_Unicode_fonts> for links). Browsing the Latin script ranges of Unicode will almost certainly turn up something which is to your liking. /BP