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Pavel Adamek eskriviw: > Which letters and digraphs do you use > for all other phenemes? Ah. A typo in my previous msg. It should be [X], not a [X\]. Anyway, Arabic script is the only official script for Ajami. To use smth else produces the same effect as e.g. Russian written in katakana. But I need to make an unofficial but standard romanization for several reasons: 1) very few people have reliable Arabic support on their computers: Unicoded/non-Unicoded, with vocalizations, additional Farsi, Urdu et sim. letters etc.; thus, to produce readable emails, I need a translit/transcript scheme; 2) I'm not fluent in reading Arabics, so for my convenience I need a kind of transcription aid for better remembering words, quicker search in a word list, quicker estimation of this or that grammar phenomenon, e.g. to compare verb endings in different conjugations in present indicative, present subjunctive and negative imperative. Because of all this, I'm trying to figure out a workable transcript scheme that should: - not disfigure words of both Ibero-Romance and Arabic origin, leaving them visually recognizable; - present all phonemic oppositions and some major allophonic variants (e.g. [e]/[i] alteration in unstressed/stressed syllables for short /i/); - being simple and email-friendly. I think I came closely to a neat solution, but the situation is aggravated by the fact I'm not sure about precise phonetic value of some letters in Arabic borrowings. Mostly I stick to the pattern I find in Sefaradi pronunciation of Hebrew. So, I make both "kaf" and "qaf" to sound as [k], "s.ad" becomes [ts)] etc. But in this case "thaa" would turn into [t], and, by analogy, "dhaal" into [d], and I'm not quite happy with this, especially since both "taa" and "t.aa" already sound as [t]. I'm looking for alternatives (as e.g. in Farsi, that made "thaa" > [s], "dhaal" > [z], but how shall I justify it?) or better arguements in favor of the [t]&[d] variant. My current version (consonants) is this: Hamza - in most cases silent; [?] between a cons. and a vowel, rendered as _7_ in Latin Translit Scheme (LTS); alif - vowel or Hamza carrier baa - [b] word initial, [v] inside paa (baa with three dots below) - [p] taa - [t] thaa - [s] jiim - [dZ)], LTS _dj_ chiim (jiim with three dots below) - [tS)], LTS _tx_ Haa and xaa - [X], LTS _hh_ daal - [d] dhaal - [z], occasionaly [d] or silent (in Ibero-Romance words) raa - [r] word initial, [4] inside; both are _r_ in LTS zain - [z] jain (zain with three dots above) - [Z], LTS _j_ siin - [s] shiin - [S], LTS _x_ s.ad - [ts)], LTS _tz_ d.ad - [dz)], LTS _dz_ t.aa - [t] z.aa - [dz)], LTS _dz_ `ain - in most cases silent; [?] between a cons. and a vowel, LTS _3_ ghain - [g] word initial, [R] inside; both are _gh_ in LTS faa - [f] qaaf and kaaf - [k] gaaf (kaaf with a stroke) - [g] laam - [l] miim - [m] nuun - [n] haa - [h] or mater lectionis waaw - [w] or mater lectionis yaa - [j] or mater lectionis, _y_ in LTS. Vowels and their spelling will need further long explanation. All I can say for now is that in speech the Ajami vocalism is close to Spanish, with [a]/[A] split à la Portuguese.