Calenyena language - ack, vowels

[aldersprig]

Okay,

This is what the vowels in Calenyena look like right now:
(Those in green are the most common transcriptions)

		English examples
ī	ai	"eye," as in light	aɪ
i	i	as in sit, shit, hit	ɪ
a	ah, aa	as in car, lob, off, mosque	ɑː
â	a	as in cat, stab, mask	æ
e	eh, e	as in let, enter, set	ɛ
ē	ie, ee	as in reed, mead, sheet	iː
u	uh, u	as in mud, usher, uncle	ʌ
ō	o	as in note, road, roast	oʊ
ū	oo	as in roost, newt, lute	uː

Note: My accent is northeastern US.  These words sound right in my accent; I understand they won't work for everyone. Recording to follow someone in the next few days.
 

The main problems are twofold:
One: the line-over-the-vowel; I can't find the high ascii number cheat for these, meaning they're a pain in the butt to put in any word. 
Two: I have trouble remembering some of them, because my default is to spell things with two vowels in place of one vowel sound, a la english.  Having a long E with one letter on the page is just sort of weird for me. 

Looking for potential other options, pls. 

Comments

[alexseanchai]

The word you want is macron. What do you mean by 'high ascii number cheat'?

[aldersprig]

Macron, thank you.

For example, if I want to do an u-umlaut, it's alt-0252, ü.

I don't know those for the macrons, and haven't been able to find them.

(This is how I end up being able to type Æowyn without it driving me bonkers.)

[alexseanchai]

Per my character map in Win 7, a-macron is--apparently you copy the damn thing from the character map, because it's not showing the alt-keypad number, which it does show when I select e-acute or u-umlaut. If I ever get back into Latin translation, I'm using acutes instead of macrons (presuming I find a source kind enough to provide macrons).

[aldersprig]

Soooo I should use something other than macrons? :-D

[clare_dragonfly]

Why not just use accent marks? Or anything else that you actually know the code for. If you're not using the marks for anything else in writing out the language, it won't be confusing. It looks like Tolkien pretty much used accent marks to indicate different kinds of vowels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvish_languages_%28Middle-earth%29

[aldersprig]

accents, you say? *steeples hands and looks interested*

(P.S. the very-limited-peoples-offer is open to you if you want to create the name of a House in the school/person-it's-named-after)

[clare_dragonfly]

Oooooh is this offer described elsewhere? Or is that pretty much it? And are the Houses like the ones in Hogwarts? :D

[aldersprig]

On Twitter, but I can explain it for you here, since you rarely twitter.


Urm... They are ~loosely~ like those in Hogwart's, except that they describe a field of study rather than a personality trait

http://reiassan.wikispaces.com/Houses

The Doctor nods

[thnidu]

Yes, he did.

"Long vowels are usually marked with the 'acute accent', as in some varieties of Fëanorian script [i.e., tengwar, the Elvish letters -- thnidu]. In Sindarin long vowels in stressed monosyllables are marked with the circumflex, since they tended in such cases to be specially prolonged; so in dûn compared with Dúnadan. The use of the circumflex in other languages such as Adûnaic or Dwarvish has no special significance, and is used merely to mark these out as alien tongues (as with the use of k)."
—LotR, Appendix E, part I; RotK pp. 393-394 in the Houghton Mifflin hardcover 2nd edition.

[aldersprig]

Okay, so using accents for the long letters - í, é, ó - but what about the flat funny a? à?

[clare_dragonfly]

That should work. Or anything that you know quickly how to make, really. As long as you're consistent with it.

[aldersprig]

I cün bé concictínt!

Um

/hides/

[thnidu]

Specifically the ácute accent, as distinguished from
• the gràve and cîrcumflex accents
• the diëresis aka umlaut (ü) (strictly so called only for German)
• the tilde (ñ)
• the çedilla
• the mācron
• the breve (ă)
• the haček aka caron aka wedge
• the ring over (å)
• the hook (ų) aka something I can't recall
• the bar (ł)
• the dot ovėr
• the dőuble acute accent
• the hơrn
• șeveral trainloa₫s of others whose names I don't know or don't remember
• and that's only listing ones used in orthographies of actual languages using the Roman alphabet, as opposed to the International Phonetic Alphabet or other notations, or based on other scripts like Cyrillic (Кириллица) or Devanagari (देवनागरी)
• and only using examples I can type on my phone's English Swype keyboard, except for the names of the other scripts, which I pasted from Google Translate.


Whew! That was fun!

[aldersprig]

mostly, I didn't use accent marks for practical considerations: It slows me down typing. Also, I can never remember what they mean in re. pronunciation.

Macron

[thnidu]

I was going to give you the Unicode code page link (Latin Extended-A, http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0100.pdf), but that only gives the hexadecimal values and has a lot of different characters besides the vowels with macron. This is from the Got Unicode? Blog of Elizabeth J. Pyatt, an instructor at Penn State University:

Got Unicode?
Typing a Macron

Word 2003 (Win XP) ALT Codes
Capital Vowels
Ā ALT+0256 Cap long A
Ē ALT+0274 Cap long E
Ī ALT+0298 Cap long I
Ō ALT+0332 Cap long O
Ū ALT+0362 Cap long U
Ȳ ALT+0562 Cap long Y
Æ ALT+0198 Cap short ash
Ǣ ALT+0482 Cap long ash

Lower Vowels
ā ALT+0257 Lower long A
ē ALT+0275 Lower long E
ī ALT+0299 Lower long I
ō ALT+0333 Lower long O
ū ALT+0363 Lower long U
ȳ ALT+0563 Lower long Y
æ ALT+0230 Lower short ash
ǣ ALT+0483 Lower long ash

H.T.H. (His Typographical Highness– NOT!)

Re: Macron

[thnidu]

PS: On my Mac, using U.S. Extended Keyboard, I hit Alt-a and then the letter, or first the letter and then Alt-Shift-A. Just sayin'.

PPS: Mnemonic for mnacrons: Were you taught that "the long vowels say their own names"? That's what we (my generation; I'm almost 65) were taught, and the dictionaries used ā ē ī ō ū for the vowels of "same seen sign sole" and the one oddball in the lot, "you", including the "y" sound. So your set here is almost in full accord with those.

One common dictionary symbol for the "cat" vowel (IPA /æ/) is ă. See next paragraph.

More diacriticized ("accented") vowels from the site linked above: Unicode Entity Codes for Phonetic Diacritics. From that, I quote:
• (To get) ă (you can type the HTML sequences)
• ă (decimal code) --- which implies that you should be able to get it in Windows with ALT-259.
• ă (hexadecimal code)

Comments on the macron system

[thnidu]

As long as you provide the table, this system should work very nicely with a few changes in the examples.

Don't use "off" as an example. Many dialects of American English, and IIRC most or all of UK and Irish English, have a different vowel for "off" than they have for "car, lob, mosque": /ɑ/* for those three, /ɔ/ for "off", as well as "for, talk, pause". You evidently have what we call the "cot/caught" merger, in which these two historically distinct vowels sound the same. Nothing wrong with that, it's just something to be aware of.

Some speakers – a minority in the US, but more in other English-speaking countries – pronounce "newt" and "lute" with /ju/ ("you") or something like it: /nʲut, lʲut/. Using "noon" and "loose" instead will avoid the confusion.

* I'm leaving off the IPA length symbol /ː/ because these are not always long in English, especially when the syllable ends with a voiceless consonant as in "mosque, newt, lute".

Re: Comments on the macron system

[aldersprig]

Lots of really useful information in your three comments here, that I'm totally failing to process because it's 6:30 in the morning. I'll come back and reread it later for content but thanks!

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

You could use digraphs. The one you're thinking of is the double letter, but it can be any pair. Torn Tongue uses single letters for short vowels and digraphs for long vowels: a, e, i, o, u, aa, ai, ei, ii, oi, uu.

Re: Well...

[inventrix]

A note! Since the language in question does not allow adjacent vowels in separate syllables, using digraphs won't cause any confusion between e.g. ei and e + i

Re: Well...

[aldersprig]

It makes the words look messssy though. Tirreenneekee

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yep, it's the same in Torn Tongue. If two vowels would be touching (due to a suffix or whatever) then they have to be separated by inserting a consonant. The digraphs are the only place two vowels appear together.

[inventrix]

Hey I didn't see this before. :O Are you still looking for ideas?

[aldersprig]

*flails hands* a bit? Mostly I got overwhelmed and grabbed the idea of accents, but I don't know what to do about a

[inventrix]

To be honest, Ysabet's suggestion is pretty much what I was thinking of. >.>

For more specific suggestions, in order of the chart:

ai
i
aa
a
e
ie
u
o
oo or uu