This is an old revision of the document!
A controversial subject is the question about long and short vowels:
The first two disadvantages can be circumvented by using a splitting symbol (e.g. be'enden, sii'iigəl)
Of course these variants can be mixed or bound to conditions (like the stress or the position of the vowel in the word).
Are we going to use the letters Z and X to represent consonant pairs? If so, the first question is which values precisely they will take; Z will be /ts/ and/or /dz/, and X will be /ks/ and/or /gz/. A second and more esoteric question is how to double them, assuming a consonant-doubling system is chosen. The following options exist:
Consonant-cluster-shortcuts like these are more common in Romanic and Slavic languages. The orthography becomes less phonetic when using them and as shown above it starts to get weird when having short and long vowels in the language. So i guess they are only relevant if using vowel-variant 0a or 0b, since except of #1 none of the options above is common in any Germanic language or any other language i know. I tend to use the explicit forms ks, ts, … — Fenris Wolf 2014/10/31 11:35
What are the names of the letters of the alphabet? A simple approach would be to let the vowels be themselves, and the consonants be themselves plus A; thus a, ba, ca, etc. This way, the names are obvious, and conflict with other words is minimised (if the letter D was di instead of da, for example, there would be ambiguity between the pronoun and the letter).
Something else that people might like to think about is the possibility of enabling “invisible little schwas”, such as exist in words like apl and spasm. NB, the only other popular auxlang that does this is Idiom Neutral.
Just a note: there could theoretically be another variant, just using the most “common” spelling of each word, which would give a mix of variants. If the languages do not differ to much, or if one minimises the differences, this would give a not to complex orthography - interlingua is done in this way, keeping differences but minimizing them. If not, this would just be inconsequent and cluttery.
A way of deciding, on the other hand, would be to look in more detail on how common and widespread each system are, and chose the most common (or, as in the above, two very common).
The possible disadvantage with consequence is that it makes some words less recognizible. Depending on the individual, this may make it harder to understand. Likewise, some will probably feel like inconsequent spelling makes the language hard, and inconsequence may for others not be any bigger obstacle. I'm getting lost here, but I don't think that inconsistent spelling, nor a bit lessened recognizability is any larger problems. (And personally, inconsistent spelling hasn't been any big obstacle when learning a language.. As you probably even can see here though, I'm not sure about the english spelling in all cases. But practically, spelling errors is not that much of a flaw in the understanding and usage of a language, it shouldn't be over-estimated. One still understands the language, and can make yourself understood - the disadvantage is that it has a low status and risc making you look incompetent..).
In a nutshell, vowel doubling is used, and accents are only necessary in special cases; for example, ruum [ru:m], bu [bu:], but bùung/buûng [bu:UN]. Here's a full listing (NB, macrons could be used instead of graves), where the options in each slot are ranked from left to right in order of preference, and where the main vowels are in bold.
Vowel | Pre cons. | Pre vowel | Final | Vowel | Pre cons. | Pre vowel | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
/a/ | a,â | a,â | a,â | /A:/ | aa,à | à | aa,à |
/E/,/@/ | e,ê | ê | e,ê | /e:/ | ee,è | e,è | ee,è |
/I/ | i,î | î | î | /i:/ | ii,ij,ì | i,ij,ì | i,ii,ij,ì |
/O/ | o,ô | ô | ô | /o:/ | oo,ò | o,ò | o,oo,ò |
/U/ | u,û | û | û | /u:/ | uu,ù | u,ù | u,uu,ù |
/9/ | ø | ø | ø | /2:/ | ø | ø | ø |
/Y/ | y | y | y | /y:/ | y | y | y |
As you can see, I don't know what to do about the front rounded vowels yet…
J-diphthongs are easy to form (aj, oj) but with U-diphthongs there's a choice between U and W. I suggest writing /aU/ as au, and using W for the other, rarer ones.
Confession: I'm not sure what the situation is in the Continental Germanic languages regarding final vowels and vowels before other vowels (my system is English-inspired in this regard) in terms of the long/short distinction, so it may be that the system can be improved there. I also have a distorted perception of certain instances of vowel + R.
If you've got strong arguments against any of these decissions, feel free to add them here or visit the IRC-channel!