Things Decided for Stupid Reasons

[Pabappa]

Not mine, but David J. Peterson has remarked that if he's working on a language where, for whatever reason, he has decided the orthographic representation of long vowels will be a doubled vowel letter, then that language can never have long /e/ and long /o/

sad, I like those sounds. I sometimes use middleman orthographies for my lesser conlangs where they don't distinguish features that would make the orthography ugly ... And even Poswa doesn't distinguish labialization in it's orthography in coda position. But I would never change the phonology to suit the orthography. If I was in a situation where people were reading my words out loud, I would use ē and ō for those sounds even if the other long vowels didn't use macrons.

I usually use macrons for long vowels in general, unless they pattern with diphthongs and are not significantly more common than diphthongs. E.g. paleo-Pabappa has /aa ee oo/, but also /ea, oa, uo/,etc, so I don't use macrons in paleo-Pabappa.

[linguistcat]

Not mine, but David J. Peterson has remarked that if he's working on a language where, for whatever reason, he has decided the orthographic representation of long vowels will be a doubled vowel letter, then that language can never have long /e/ and long /o/

sad, I like those sounds. I sometimes use middleman orthographies for my lesser conlangs where they don't distinguish features that would make the orthography ugly ...

I mean that wasn't a random thing tho, or to avoid making things "ugly". His specific reason was that actors speaking the languages he made, especially native monoglot English speakers, would tend to pronounce them /i/ and /u/ respectively, and he wanted to avoid that.

If the comment about avoiding ugliness didn't really have to do with the DJP's orthographies, ignore that in my reply.

[HazelFiver]

I made /ŋ/ only occur at the beginning and end of stems and /ng/ only occur in the middle because I didn't want to come up with ways to write them differently. For whatever reason I don't like <ŋ> and <ngg>. I may change this in the future and go with a diacritic solution.

[Zaarin]

I made /ŋ/ only occur at the beginning and end of stems and /ng/ only occur in the middle because I didn't want to come up with ways to write them differently. For whatever reason I don't like <ŋ> and <ngg>. I may change this in the future and go with a diacritic solution.

<ñ> and <ĝ> are some popular choices for /ŋ/.

[jal]

<ñ> and <ĝ> are some popular choices for /ŋ/.

Though not in any way better...


JAL

[mèþru]

I have both <ŋ> and <ng> for /ŋ/ due to merger

[Pabappa]

I use <g> for /ŋ/ in some languages where I don't have any other use for <g>. (Also I always assign priority for <g> to the velar fricative /γ/, since it's much more common in my languages than the stop).

Fijian uses <q>, I think.

In general I like clean looking orthographies, so I avoid diacritics if possible, but prefer diacritics to digraphs, and digraphs to foreign glyphs. ŋ is familiar to us through IPA exposure but still makes a word look alien to me. There's also the problem that it doesn't have a distinct capital form .... You either use rotated G or something that doesn't look much different than N. As a kid , pre Internet, I used a capital N with a G-like curve on the left side, which I think sort of makes sense but would look ugly in print.

[mèþru]

the second capital here looks pretty distinctive:

Also, it's not just IPA but has been used in many suggested reforms of English and saw occasional historical use.

[mèþru]

Also many languages use eng in real life in the present.

[Zaarin]

<ñ> and <ĝ> are some popular choices for /ŋ/.

Though not in any way better...


JAL

Not in any way better than what? If someone doesn't like <ŋ> or <ng> for /ŋ/, I was pointing out options that other languages use for writing the phoneme...

[HazelFiver]

I know ñ is used sometimes, but I'll always associate it with /ɲ/ because of Spanish. I would probably use a different diacritic, though I have a hard time reading <n> with any diacritic as anything other than /n/ or /ɲ/. <g> and <q> are already taken, and using a non-nasal letter for a nasal just seems strange, even though I know it's been done. Yes, I'm very picky.

I also find /ŋ/ between vowels to be unintuitive itself because I don't speak any language where it commonly occurs.

[Bessunire]

Proto-Aereic has a- and i-augments on nouns and verbs. They don't actually do anything, but they're there, except when they disappear occasionally. The reason they exist is because at some point I decided that the vast majority of Proto-Aereic roots were disyllabic, and that trisyllabic roots were particularly rare and most likely loanwords. This caused a problem, however, because the Haðirisi words for 'fire' and 'to carry' are agaþe and išaba-. I couldn't find a way to derive the words for such basic concepts from two-syllable roots, and so I introduced a- and i-augments to get the Proto-Aereic roots *ga²sʲei³ and *tʃæ³ba³-.

[linguistcat]

Would it count if for this if, while deriving from an actual language which had 2 contrasting sounds that collapsed into one sound at a later stage in the language, and I have no evidence either way which of these it was in a specific word (looking up etymology, looking for correspondences in related languages, etc), and I just say "Yeah, it's gonna be the less common one because I want it to be." Cuz I'm about to do that.

[Salmoneus]

Proto-Aereic has a- and i-augments on nouns and verbs. They don't actually do anything, but they're there, except when they disappear occasionally. The reason they exist is because at some point I decided that the vast majority of Proto-Aereic roots were disyllabic, and that trisyllabic roots were particularly rare and most likely loanwords. This caused a problem, however, because the Haðirisi words for 'fire' and 'to carry' are agaþe and išaba-. I couldn't find a way to derive the words for such basic concepts from two-syllable roots, and so I introduced a- and i-augments to get the Proto-Aereic roots *ga²sʲei³ and *tʃæ³ba³-.

It seems easy to imagine either of those words being loanwords, or developed from longer roots.

In the case of 'fire', there's an obvious opportunity for taboos - fire is both dangerous and often given religious significance, so it shouldn't be that unusual for the word to become taboo and be replaced by a loanword or a paraphrase (like, 'the consumer', or 'the light of heaven' or something).

In the case of carrying, it's a very common word that often suffers semantic drift and hence need replacement (in English, for example, "to bear" and "to ferry" have drifted off slightly, while "to port" has become rare outside of derivations (porter, portage)).

So in English, "to carry" is a loanword, and so is "to convey"; "fire" isn't, but words like "conflagration", "ignition" and "inferno" are.

[Tropylium]

My "favorite stupid" transcription for /ŋ/ is ɳ, which is for some reason common in Hungary.

I believe this is derived as a mis-Latinization of η, which was often used as a substitute for the proper thing. Today Unicode also has Latin Ƞ ƞ though, probably for some recently-written language that managed to establish eta for /ŋ/…

[Bessunire]

Proto-Aereic has a- and i-augments on nouns and verbs. They don't actually do anything, but they're there, except when they disappear occasionally. The reason they exist is because at some point I decided that the vast majority of Proto-Aereic roots were disyllabic, and that trisyllabic roots were particularly rare and most likely loanwords. This caused a problem, however, because the Haðirisi words for 'fire' and 'to carry' are agaþe and išaba-. I couldn't find a way to derive the words for such basic concepts from two-syllable roots, and so I introduced a- and i-augments to get the Proto-Aereic roots *ga²sʲei³ and *tʃæ³ba³-.

It seems easy to imagine either of those words being loanwords, or developed from longer roots.

In the case of 'fire', there's an obvious opportunity for taboos - fire is both dangerous and often given religious significance, so it shouldn't be that unusual for the word to become taboo and be replaced by a loanword or a paraphrase (like, 'the consumer', or 'the light of heaven' or something).

In the case of carrying, it's a very common word that often suffers semantic drift and hence need replacement (in English, for example, "to bear" and "to ferry" have drifted off slightly, while "to port" has become rare outside of derivations (porter, portage)).

So in English, "to carry" is a loanword, and so is "to convey"; "fire" isn't, but words like "conflagration", "ignition" and "inferno" are.

I see your point there. One etymology I came up with for agaþe was that it started out as the name of a god or spirit of fire, which then came to be used to mean 'fire' in a similar way to how the Greeks would refer to fire as Ἥφαιστος. Now that I have them, though, I think I'm going to keep the augments just because they add that much more weirdness to my conlang.

[Vlürch]

I like <ň> for /ŋ/. <ñ> is also fine. <ƞ> looks nice. <ņ> would be cool if the cedilla connected to either one of the "legs", but it doesn't (at least in any font that I know, and if it does in some stylistic font, it's basically irrelevant), so it's generally not what I'd use even if every other diacritic in the orthography was a cedilla. <ṋ> or <ṉ> work, too. You could even use <ᵰ> or <ʼn>, or maybe <ǹ> if <ń> was used for the palatal nasal or something. The common romanisation of Sanskrit and other Indian languages uses <ṅ>, which is also alright. Actually, <ng> is one of the few digraphs I really like as well.

...basically, in my opinion it doesn't matter how it's romanised as long as it's some kind of "N-letter". Sometimes even letters that look nothing like N could work. Anything but <q>, really.

[Pabappa]

My dislike of IPA /g/ may date back to a very early conlang, Moonshine, from 1994, which was very compact and optimized for religious writing. Many words consisted of just single consonants. The word for God was k, and the word for Satan was g. Therefore, I avoided creating any other words with /g/, instead preferring to substitute another sound such as /ð/. I think of IPA /g/ today as an ugly sound, but I cant say whether or not I subconsciously acquired the association from early Moonshine. Today, in almost all of my conlangs, whenever I write /g/, even in slashes, it usually means IPA /ɣ/, which I dont dislike, and if it's not /ɣ/, it's probably /ŋ/. Why I'm using g for /ŋ/ is something I already mentioned above ... I prefer to use plain Latin letters as much as possible, and I dont dislike the grapheme for g as much as I dislike the sound.

[TurkeySloth]

I like <ň> for /ŋ/. <ñ> is also fine. <ƞ> looks nice. <ņ> would be cool if the cedilla connected to either one of the "legs", but it doesn't (at least in any font that I know, and if it does in some stylistic font, it's basically irrelevant), so it's generally not what I'd use even if every other diacritic in the orthography was a cedilla. <ṋ> or <ṉ> work, too. You could even use <ᵰ> or <ʼn>, or maybe <ǹ> if <ń> was used for the palatal nasal or something. The common romanisation of Sanskrit and other Indian languages uses <ṅ>, which is also alright. Actually, <ng> is one of the few digraphs I really like as well.

...basically, in my opinion it doesn't matter how it's romanised as long as it's some kind of "N-letter". Sometimes even letters that look nothing like N could work. Anything but <q>, really.

Except that <ƞ> stands for a vowel, [i]—specifically, in Greek. Speaking of, while my need to have letters fit into the same phonological category as their parent language may not be stupid, it prevents me from using some more inventive initial transcriptions. "Initial transcriptions" because I refuse to call use of non-Latinate letters "Romanization."

[Zaarin]

I like <ň> for /ŋ/. <ñ> is also fine. <ƞ> looks nice. <ņ> would be cool if the cedilla connected to either one of the "legs", but it doesn't (at least in any font that I know, and if it does in some stylistic font, it's basically irrelevant), so it's generally not what I'd use even if every other diacritic in the orthography was a cedilla. <ṋ> or <ṉ> work, too. You could even use <ᵰ> or <ʼn>, or maybe <ǹ> if <ń> was used for the palatal nasal or something. The common romanisation of Sanskrit and other Indian languages uses <ṅ>, which is also alright. Actually, <ng> is one of the few digraphs I really like as well.

...basically, in my opinion it doesn't matter how it's romanised as long as it's some kind of "N-letter". Sometimes even letters that look nothing like N could work. Anything but <q>, really.

Except that <ƞ> stands for a vowel, [i]—specifically, in Greek. Speaking of, while my need to have letters fit into the same phonological category as their parent language may not be stupid, it prevents me from using some more inventive initial transcriptions. "Initial transcriptions" because I refuse to call use of non-Latinate letters "Romanization."

N with a long right leg <ƞ> is a different letter than eta <η>.