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History: Devanagari orthography
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Source of version: 1
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''I created a very, very experimental Devanagiri orthography. Until I get an image up, I will describe it here:'' The syllabic script is abandoned. So are the letters 'ei', 'ai', 'ou' and 'au'. Vowel marks now form dipthongs. The sound for retroflex 'sh' is used for Lojban 'j'. The aspirated stops are dropped. Double line for capitalization, 'aha' for full stop and other symbols unchanged. (I think writing an apostrophe would be pretty hard, though...) I'm currently making a graphic that will map Lojban to Devanagari, one-to-one, and I'll add a link here soon. ''A Devanagari orthography has been discussed on the list. See [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/1323,] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/1324, [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/1341'' Since] the topic is pretty old there, I think I'll continue the discussion here. Yes, indeed, the "unwritten vowel" is a schwa, just like Lojban y. However, it would be much more useful in to have it represent Lojban "a" in this orthography. Now, to write a conjuct consonant starting with r that doesn't have an equivalent in an Indic language, the problem is easily solved by "r" sign (like a hook on top) Others aren't so simple. The suggestion for using ph for Lojban "f" and bh for Lojban "v" was a good one. Dipthongs, on second thought, would be better written, (also as suggested on the list) using the available dipthongs. The Devanagari diphthong "ai", although beginning with a schwa, can be used for Lojban "ai". Indeed, all diphtongs in Lojban are taken care of save "ii" and "uu". If we were using an orthogaphy like Kannada or Telugu, the solution for this would be quite simple: use the existing letters for long "i" and long "u". Unfortunately, Devanagari has the fomer, but not the latter, so to be consistent, we must use the "initial form" of each -with- the diacritic on the vowel. ''Maybe I missed this in the discussion, but when I studied Sanskrit, there certainly was a letter (and a diacritic) for long-u, as well as long-i. What I don't see, though, is a diphthong for __oi__.''(Because /o/ is already a diphthong in Sanskrit, the short form of /au/. pc)'' As to the other falling diphthongs, would you write them with semivowels w/y instead of vowels? And are we using visarga for apostrophe, as I would think should be obvious? --mi'e mark. Eep, it looks like some of what's said there was by __me__. I should read it first.'' ::Bap!:: I was thehink about 'ei'. Sorry. Yes, you can write the other falling dipthongs with semivowels. Hm... and I never noticed __oi__ either. What about __eu__? Same problem. ''(Exactly; /e/ is short /ai/. pc)'' And the visarga is logical for the apostrophe. Wouldn't the danda be logical for the full stop? And the puurNaviraama for the comma might work too. Make c into Lojban c and ch into Lojban tc, and j into Lojban j and jh into Lojban dj, Devanagari "h" into Lojban x, and all you have to worry about is punctuation. Now a full stop could be indicated using "aha", but as I said earlier, the "'" becomes a problem. So does capitalisation and the comma, because none of the existing Devanagari fonts I've seen so far have anything equivalent to those symbols. Any suggestions? (Was this in the earlier messages? Transcribing English and Arabic and whatever, modern Hindi uses dots creatively: I remember dotted /j/ for /z/ -- and monolinguals saying things like /dijaster/ and /sijors/-- a brand of ciggyboos. pc) ---- Whoever was working on this, if you could describe this orthography in terms of the Unicode Devanagari code chart at: [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0900.pdf] then a ((yudit)) keymap can be made very easily, and then pictures can be made even easier. --((Jay Kominek))
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