OP velar fricative orthography

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Bryan Gordon wrote:
> 1) "normal" symbols vs. "weird" symbols
> There's a whole scale of "normalcy" when we discuss orthographic
> symbols, and all of us would do well to admit to ourselves and to each
> other that this scale is very English-centric.

It seems to me that the Anglocentrism is coming from the Omaha and Ponca
communities in this case.  The linguists are more Americanist-centric, at
least to the extent that they are American.

> 2) Learnability
> Many of the speakers had traumatic experiences centring about learning to
> read and write in English,

Hey, me, too!

> and it is a frequent sentiment that imposing new diacritics or letters
> is akin to forcing people to learn to read and write all over again.

Always necessary in a new language, though there is a fair amount of carry
over if the orthography is also roman-based.

> 3) Orthographic Disruption
> The feeling here is that there are writing systems already in use, and
> people have invested time and money into learning and printing them, so
> letʼs stick with them.

The bulk of published Omaha-Ponca material is in the Dorsey system (or
one of them), but I think it best not to try to stick with that one, which
isn't popular with anyone, anyway.

> For once in history, also, the official orthographies of Omaha and Ponca
> are close enough that you can skip from one to the other without much
> thought.

It is definitely worth trying to stick with the new systems, however,
since, as you point out, they are pretty similar.  In addition, they are
essentially adequate.  I would recommend not messing with them, actually,
beyond getting them to agree more fully, and certain expedients like
doubling vowels to indicate length.

I would also recommend that no group working on Omaha or Ponca using these
alphabetic conventions start make any decisions about changes without
consulting with the others.  In fact, maybe there should be an Omaha and
Ponca alphabet commission at some point.

> 5) Distinctiveness from other languages This sort of stands in
> opposition to confusion. Early on, Omaha and Ponca orthographies used
> symbols like <ǧ, ȟ, pʻ, tʻ, kʻ>, but nobody ever looked back after
> the transition to <x, pÊ°, tÊ°, kÊ°> was made. I think this is because
> nobody wanted Omaha or Ponca to look too much like Lakhota.

I may be missing osme of this because I can't read it, but I honestly
don't think difference from Dakota has ever been a desideratum.  Dorsey
took his notes in an adaptation of the Riggs system.  He published in the
BAE system because he worked for the BAE and the BAE system, which had
pretentions to scholarly completeness and standardization, was mandatory.
Dakota work from this same period mostly escapes this because it had a
working popular scheme and because most publication on it was done by
non-BAE workers.

Modern Siouanist usage is either an attempt to be rigorously phonemic and
popularly feasible or an attempt to be rigorously phonemic and suitable
for all Siouan languages.  Thus comparativists tend to distinguish c, ch,
etc., from c^, c^h, etc., to facilitate combined discussions of languages
using one or the other even though no one language uses both.
Non-comparativists tend not to care.  Non-comparative contexts combined
with an attempt to be feasible and more or less popular account for the
various attempts to use hacek with letters like h, g, or n.  These
decisions were made when an IBM Selectric with a custom ball was the
bleeding edge of variant character set technology.

> 6) Loss of distinctions in clusters
> This is the main point of the post Rory just sent. He points out that
> the phonetic realisation of a velar fricative in a cluster is always
> unvoiced, so we should use the unvoiced variant in the orthography ...
> Itʼs not just the fricatives, though. Comparative and phonetic evidence
> suggests that the stops in fricative-stop clusters in Omaha-Ponca are
> the "simple" stops, i.e., the voiced ones.  So should the orthography
> move from <shk, xp, st, etc.> to <shg, xb, sd>?

Ken Miner did in Winnebago.  But on this basis we might want to write
snede as znede, though I think it's not quite that simple.

I've tried writing bdj^g as ptc^k in OP, but nobody liked it:  in the end
not even me.

(Apologies for ignoring the nice bits in Unicode.  I'm not cutting and
pasting.)