Thanks for the help. I've worked on some refinements, but nothing I'm
ready to show anyone; hopefully I'll get time to finish a font
(probably in MetaFont format).

On Thu, Apr 05, 2001 at 07:39:42PM +0200, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> If "y" means the initial sound in "yes", it should be "j" in IPA. IPA "y" is
> the u in French "lune": [ly:n].
>
> Why are "y" and "w" classified with vowels? They are consonants in all
> respects.

They were classified as semivowels in the book I was using. I've
moved them to the consonant section.

> - There are two series of consonants: are they uppercase and lowercase?

Yes.

> - If yes, I don't know the scenario of your role game, but is it plausible
> that English spelling underwent such a radical change without eliminating
> the capital letters?

Why not? Look at the Deseret alphabet. In the gameworld, the person
who created this was a prophet pushing literacy after a dark age,
but having pretty much only English to work from. The vowels were
originally designed to be used only when essential to seperate words
that would be confusing in context - this being English, vowels
quickly became used everywhere except in some of the oldest
documents.

> - Are vowels diacritics that stack on top of consonants or are they written
> beside the consonants?

They're written beside the consonants. You could usually do a decent job
setting the consonants without concern for the vowels, and then adding in
the vowels above.

> - English has a lot of diphthongs, like the [au] in ['hauz] (house), or the
> [ou] in [pi'ænou] (piano): how are these spelled?

Like au or ou.

> - How is it indicated a consonant without a vowel: is there a sort of
> "virama" or simply the consonant is written without signs?

Just the consonants written without signs.

> - What is the direction of writing?

Classically boustrophedonic, but with exposure to outside writings,
many technical documents are written left to right.

(Not that I'd thought about most of those issues before you asked;
being monolingual with limited training in a couple Indo-European
languages certainly hurts here.)

> Something he didn't mention is that some of the glyphs (like S) look like they
> are designed to be joined together, while others (like D) clearly cannot be. Is
> any joining or ligation intended in this script?

The vowels, the punctuation and the numbers don't join. In standard
printing, nothing joins, and I'll pull in some of the letters to
make that clearer. There's also a cursive form where most of the
lowercase characters connect (but the uppercase never connect.) It
seems to have the Cherokee problem, though, where you have a lot of
glyphs that may be nice in isolation but don't seem to flow in
print.

> Please note that my expertise in glyph variation is suspect. My invented script
> was deemed "not workable" on this list by one of the world's leading experts,
> primarily because the glyphs in my script are too similar and too dependent on
> rotations and reflections. So yours may succeed where mine did not.

I don't really need it to succeed at anything; it's only going to be
used for some games and maybe some private notes. Whether or not
this script is a great English phonetic script, I find it plausible
that it could be adopted for English if pushed by a charismatic
leader in a situation where a new script could feasibly be adopted.

> On a different note, I am puzzled by the lack of the [z] sound in an
> English derivative.

I was tired of drawing consonants, so I decided that they lost a
sound. [z] got picked for fairly arbitary reasons. Was that a bad
idea? Why? Would [h] becoming silent in most places be improbable?
(Losing [h] being an independent decision from losing or keeping
[z]).

--
David Starner - dstarner98@...
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg