Orthography

[Louanna Furbee]

Lance,
	I'm completely overwhelmed and can't respond to all of your
orthography queries (plus other comments on them from other people)
at this minute, but here is a quick, unresearched set of opinions.

	I would suggest that if you can do a superscript n for
nazalization, you probably can do a superscript h for either pre or
post aspiration.  So, you could do hm  (with the h superscipt) for
preaspirated m, for example, and ph, th, kh, even chh if you want to
do that (again with the last h superscript).  I'm not sure I'd chose
that for my purposes, but it would leave th  (no superscript)
available for theta and ch for the ch/j (with hachek) of Chiwere (the
one that is unaspirated, lenis, and sometimes is heard as a voiced
affricate by English speakers).  To that end, with respect to your
query


	I still have a problem with whether the b/p in b/paxoje was
originally supposed
	to be "snow" (ba) or "head" (pa)

  I'd think if the if it is the unaspirated b/p, then it's going to
derive from the "snow" example, if the p "head" is ordinarily
aspirated, but I'd have to look up these forms to be sure.

If you're going to used b, d, g, j  for the lenis, sometimes voiced,
sometimes voiceless consonant series, then you can reserve ph, th, k,
ch, etc. (superscript h in each) for the aspirated, tense, voiceless
consonants.

The other big set is the glottalized one:  just use an apostrophe
after the letter for that:  p', t', k', ch', etc.

If you're writing long vowels, just double the vowel or use a colon
after it:  aa or a:

Like you, I don't find any easy solution to the ng problem.  If it is
always clear where there is a word boundary, then it is ok with ng.
In that case, you can write ngk, when a syllable ends with an agma
and begins with a k/g.  It might work, but it looks clugy.  More and
better later.   Louanna
--
Prof. N. Louanna Furbee
Department of Anthropology
107 Swallow Hall
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO  65211 USA
Telephones: 573/882-9408 (office)
	   573/882-4731 (department)
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E-mail:  FurbeeL at missouri.edu