Hi Peter, all,

Re diacritics, what is the prevailing opinion (if any) among experts
in writing systems? Obviously they are common in many languages for
different purposes and it's just a question of learning them.

The 1930 edition of Practical Orthography of African Languages has
this statement about diacritics:
"For practical purposes in everyday life diacritic marks constitute a
difficulty and a danger."

However that is couched in what reads like a thoroughly colonialist
(read racist) evaluation of capacities of "natives." (See
http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/poal30.htm and search "diaccritic")

Re digraphs, I'd also be interested to know what is the dominant
thinking. Digraphs are not all alike from what I see:
* Some are pretty intuitive once you learn the sound system of the
letters (putting a /y/ after an /n/ is easy to sound out as a palatal
n; /s/ after /t/ as whatever one calls /ts/; etc.). Vowel dipthongs
might be under this category.
* Some are by convention (/h/ in particular is thrown into many
situations following another letter where the resulting sound is not
intuitive, but must be memorized as such - e.g., /h/ after /t/ in
English stands for two possible sounds depending on the word). It has
even been promoted as a high tone marker for one or two languages
(i.e., /h/ after a vowel that carries a high tone)
* Ambiguous pairings that could be sounded out different ways (only
example I can think of is /ng/ which is the velar n in English, but a
prenasalized g in others; languages with both a prenasalized g and a
velar n need something else to distinguish, such as the /ŋ/ for the
velar n in many West African languages or the /n'g/ for the
prenasalized g in East Africa.

Long story made short, I'm wondering if some digraph combinations are
less than optimal solutions if one were developing a new orthography.

Don

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> Well, he claims that diacritics are bad.
>
> Somali uses a roman alphabet without diacritics. There's nothing
wrong with digraphs.
> --
> Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Don Osborn <dzo@...>
> To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 6:24:45 PM
> Subject: Re: "FaYe" - a proposed new script for Yoruba
>
> Thanks Peter. You're probably right, but I generally give such
> proposals some respect, even while being skeptical. The N'Ko movement
> after all began half a century ago with Souleuman Kante (not a trained
> linguist or typographer) deciding to develop an alphabet for Manding.
> The relative success of that may be the exception and in any event the
> space for new alphabet inventions is changing: It is both easier to
> develop an alphabet idea and publicize it, and less likely that it
> actually be widely adopted.
>
> On the other hand, the two invented alphabets (of the several) in
> Africa that seem to be having the most success are N'Ko and perhaps
> Mandombe (which was created in the '70s in what is now D.R. Congo
> mainly for Kongo language). Not sure what conclusions to draw except
> that it may reflect more than people with too much time on their
> hands: is there something with the Latin orthographies for African
> languages that somehow just doesn't work for some of their speakers?
>