Subject: [sona_language] Writing Sona in Cyrillic Characters
From: "Paul Bartlett" <bartlett@panix.com>
Date: 2013-03-05 1:40 PM
To: sona_language@yahoogroups.com

UTF-8; appropriate font needed to view.

There has been no activity of late in this list. That seems to be rather  
typical of many mailing lists / newsgroups / blogs dealing with some  
artificial languages. A brief initial flurry of interest, and then little  
or nothing.

Anyway, something occurred to me on the side. In The Book (§§8-10, pp.  
28-31), Kenneth Searight describes the sounds of Sona and their alphabetic  
representation:

Six vowels  a, e, i, o, u, y.
Six aspirates  c, j, x, f, v, h.
Six consonants (i)  g, d, z, m, b, l.
Six consonants (ii)  k, t, s, n, p, r.

(His use of the term "aspirates" may not be quite standard today.) Most of  
these are quite straightforward. However, he points out that <c>, <j>, and  
<x> are used differently among different languages employing the Latin  
alphabet. In SAMPA notation, he specifies them as /tS/, /Z/ or /dZ/, and  
/S/, respectively. (I myself prefer simply /Z/ for <j>, as I think it may  
be more common and thus easier for some users. Also he says that <z> is  
/z/ but could be /ts/ as in German. Again, I prefer the former.)

Because of the different uses of some letters, I have noticed that the  
Cyrillic alphabet can render the sounds of Sona rather exactly:

Аа, Ее, Ии, Оо, Уу, Йй.
Чч, Жж, Шш, Фф, Вв, Хх.
Гг, Дд, Зз, Мм, Бб, Лл.
Кк, Тт, Сс, Нн, Пп, Рр.

(The alternate pronunciations of <j> and <z> would be spelled <Ѓѓ> and  
<Цц>.)

A bit of an oddity, I admit, but in the computer age, writing in alternate  
scripts, especially major ones such as Latin and Cyrillic, is no large  
matter.

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