Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> > Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
> > "non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.
>
> Some of the Roman alphabet-based 'syllabaries', e.g. that of
> Potawatomi, deliberately drop the phonation contrast! Or are you
> denying these systems the status of 'orthographies'?

Believe it or not, there are languages in which voice is not phonemic.

Is this one of them?

> Philippine orthographies relegate glottal stops to the pronunciations
> shown in dictionaries. Malay <e> (two distinct vowels) and final <k>
> also spring to mind, though <k> may be an example of a language having
> two co-existing spelling systems - native and loanword.
>
> As to the Royal Thai General System of Transcription,...

I don't, of course, know what you're talking about, but if you're
suggesting that /'/ is a phoneme unrepresented in the orthography, is it
predictable from the phonotactics?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...