[Rgyalrong] Question about orthography

[Yu Lha]

Hello all,


I have been working on an orthography for my mother tongue Khroskyabs and I
ran into a difficulty regarding the ‘depth’ of orthography, meaning the
level of linguistic structure to represent orthographically.  I have been
consulting with Yunfan and I am hoping to get your insights on this.


The orthography is based on Tibetan alphabets which the speakers are
already familiar with. The question that I ran into is whether or not to
reflect allophonic contrasts with different graphemes.


There are both pros and cons for either way. With my priority being
language revitalization with high learnability, I am even thinking about
combining both systems to maximize the sound-spelling transparency while
simplifying some allophones with existing Tibetan preintials.


The allophonic variation cases:

pre-initial allophonic nasal: mb, mpʰ, mp, nd, nt, ntʰ, ŋg, ŋk, ŋkʰ  (For
this contrast, I decided to use འ)

Other pre-initial cases: <ʁ χ> , <ɣ x>, <v f>, <l ɬ>,  <s z>


Any suggestions on how to represent the distinction between surface and
underlying forms orthographically is appreciated.



Best,

Yulha
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