Digraph/Trigraph/Tetragraph Proposals

[Nic Casálmac'h]

Last night Nic asked what reason there is to change the X digraphs. I point out that I did not suggest changing them at all.

I was just addressing those who thought we should change them.

I did not propose gñh become gn simply because "I like it better." I proposed it because it makes linguistic sense to me as the way the language users would come to write that sound, given the entirety of the orthography in the language.

Man, you've just about convinced me. I didn't think you were just throwing about things because you liked them that way, but it is nice to know that you are really thinking out the linguistic development. And it's good to see it too.

Well, really we cannot try to make Talossan evolve as it would naturally (I don't think) because once a language is written and a set of standards written, it tends not to change very much. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) So really what we are trying to do, is evolve the language as it would have evolved before.

It seems to me that's a difficult thing to do. It could have evolved a certain way, but it wouldn't necessarily have done so.

So...are there any languages now that have trigraphs like this? Do they always evolve out?

[King John]

German has the trigraph SCH which Talossan shares, and Breton has C'H for the glottal fricative, which is where Ben got the idea for Talossan. I don't think I know of any trigraphs for simple consonant sounds in any other writing systems.

Of course, gñh and glh aren't exactly simple consonant sounds. They're kind of like NY in canyon or LY in, uh, billyun — palatalized N and L. Ben's account of how Talossan got gñh and glh is worth pondering:

This grapheme [gñh] is actually an amalgamation of the way three different languages spell the [N] sound: Spanish uses ñ, Italian uses gn, and Portuguese uses nh. Put all three together and you get gñh! (Similarly the trigraph glh represents the [L] sound similar to the "ll" in English "million"; it is a fusion of Italian gl and Portuguese lh.)

I doubt anything like that ever happened in any natural language!

— John R

[Nic Casálmac'h]

That's funny.

So I guess "gñh" really should go... and glh... Trying to keep them I guess would be solely--or at least primarily--for their aesthetic value.

Well, according to the pronunciation page on the website "nh" and "lh" are already used. How much are they used? (I could of course just look, but I figure it's much easier and faster to ask those who already know.) If this is indeed the case, it makes sense to me that these are the forms that should be used. Lord Hooligan was suggesting using "gn" instead, but it looks to me as if dropping the "g" makes more sense than dropping the "h".

How much is there that is actually written in Talossan? Is there anything beyond what is on the website? Really we should have a whole bunch of stuff written so that when the language changes we could look back at what Talossan used to be. (Middle Talossan?) That would be cool.

[King John]

One good reason to use gn instead of nh is that a great many of our words with gñh come from Latin originals spelled with gn (which in ancient Latin was actually pronounced as a g and an n — go figure). Keeping the spelling gn (as Italian did) preserves etymological information that would be lost or obscured if we went to nh (as Portuguese did).

LH is used in only two words, filharmonic and bilharzitis, and in both of those it probably should be l'h because it should be pronounced L followed by H.

— John R

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

mha said:

Sorry for the length of this response. Please read it all, though; I think it came out pretty good. I tried to shorten it to help my reader (and readership numbers); honestly I did. But well, you know me. It grew instead of shrank, despite my best intentions, every time I edited it after posting.

You sound like me.

Now, then, Talossan has one way of writing it: gnh. Whenever this combination of letters is seen written, however, the reader will need to be given a way to know and decide if this is g, followed by the nh digraph, or if it is the full gnh trigraph (the one that in Older Talossan used to have a tilde and be written gñh), or if it is a G sound, followed by an N sound, followed by an H sound. (This is where my proposal 1 -- simply stating what has always been The Talossan Way to solve this problem -- comes in.)

I think this is a solution in need of a problem. In other languages, people rarely have a problem recognizing a digraph or trigraph for what it is. Talossan doesn't have g followed by the nh digraph. You'd never expect to find G followed by an N sound followed by an H sound, either. If you did, in some bizarre foreign borrowing, you'd naturally separate the sounds with apostrophes and never think to let that bizarre foreign combination affect a perfectly normal native trigraph.

In time, evolution would likely lead the bizarre foreign combination to conform to native sounds. It doesn't seem likely that the foreign sound combination would displace established orthography for native sounds. If we do get dozens of G-N-H words that resist the natural pressure to assimilate to the familiar gnh sound, though, I'll revisit my opinion.

If (as has been granted) gñh can be simplified to gnh (without the tilde), would not the users of the language (that's us), as the language evolved, take note of the fact that the H is completely unnecessary, and drop it as well?? I argue that they (we) would. Not only is GN sitting there WAITING for the users of the language to notice it as the only real important part of GNH, but I argue that in a natural evolution of a language, this fact WOULD be noticed, and GN would become used in preference to GNH. Just as the tilde would drop, the unnecessary H would drop.

Again, the problem is that users of a language tend to view digraphs and trigraphs as a whole. They learn that "these letters together make THIS sound" and don't analyze them separately. So they don't see any of the letters as "unnecessary." Maybe the H would drop. Or maybe it would stick around like the H in the English digraph GH, or the C in the German trigraph SCH (they could write it SH like the English, after all). But there's no reason it would have to drop. And in the absence of a compelling reason to change something, let's not. If something is plausible, even if not necessary the very most likely state of affairs, let's keep it. We should err on the side of not changing hundreds of long-standing Talossan words.

Retention of the H leads to the necessity of writing gn'h to enunciate all three letters if need be. One single mark of separation introduced into a trigraph, which causes it in one case (g'nh) to be separated into not two sonds, but when put in another place (gn'h) causes it to be separated into three sounds??!? This is not something a language would do. Linguistic evolution would eat that up right quick.

True, it's not something a language would do. But it's not something Talossan does now. So there's no problem to be fixed here. In general, sounds that don't exist don't put evolutionary pressure on sounds that do exist. It'd be like German developing SH to replace SCH to avoid confusion with words that have S and CH back to back, when there are no words that have S and CH back to back.

I simply think that the evolution of our language should be permitted

I agree! So I think what we need to do is let the language evolve more. That means not directing changes. A language never stops evolving. So if we feel compelled to jump to the changes that evolution would naturally bring about, once we have one set of changes adopted the natural question becomes "what would the next natural set of evolutionary changes be?" And then the language lives its whole life on fast-forward. Let it evolve.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

john said:

German has the trigraph SCH which Talossan shares, and Breton has C'H for the glottal fricative, which is where Ben got the idea for Talossan. I don't think I know of any trigraphs for simple consonant sounds in any other writing systems.

Some trigraphs from other languages (some aren't really simple consonant sounds, but as you point out, neither are the Talossan ones):

Corsican and Gallurese (a Corso-Sardinian dialect): ghj, chj
Hungarian: dzs (this is used for the English j-in-jam sound)
Welsh: ngh (a nasal mutation of "c")
German: tsch, dsch (the initial sounds in "church" and "jam," respectively)
Rumansch: sch, like German
Walloon: sch, tch

Even the Italian version of glh is often described as a trigraph, just like the Talossan representation of the sound. The Italian sound is best described as represented by the trigraph "gli," because the digraph "gl" doesn't make that sound by itself. Without I, GL is just GL like in English "glen."

I doubt anything like that ever happened in any natural language!

I think what's happened in a lot of other languages isn't all that far off. Portuguese borrowed the NH digraph from Occitan. English borrowed the TH digraph from Latin to replace what used to be an independent letter. A number of minor Romance languages have historically been spoken much more than written, and their modern orthographies were created in the relatively recent past by relatively small numbers of people, who borrowed and modified graphemes from other languages as needed.

[King John]

Back to my posting of June 4, I don't know why I didn't mention the biggest reason not to use GL for the LY-as-in-million sound. GL is already used in Talossan for (surprise!) a G followed by an L. Glas = drinking glass, gläts = happy, regleu = rule, glischt = church, glorifiar = glorify, glü = glue. And so on.

— John R

[Hooligan]

After some serious thought and research, I have modified and updated two of the proposals (the first two bullet points in proposal group 2) that are being made in this thread. Specifically:

• Respell the (extremely few) uses of the digraph NH as GÑH (and a later proposal, of course, would have these -- with the other GÑH's -- become GN). This eliminates the NH digraph completely.
  
  
• Respell the (also extremely few) uses of the letter Ñ as NG, and specify a rule for when the G-sound is to be enunciated (that is, when to say the NG as in English "finger" and when to say it as in English "singer").

Please take a look at the changes I made to the posting at the top of this thread. These changes simplify the proposals I put forth concerning the N graphs, and make the modifications much smaller in scope.

Hooligan

[Hooligan]

After yet more serious thought, research, discussion, and debate, I have updated the proposals yet again, this time as follows:

• The proposal (numbered 4) to change C'H to GH was withdrawn. No change is now proposed for C'H.
  
  
• The proposal (numbered 6b) to change SCH to SH was withdrawn. In its place is now a proposal to change SH to SCH. There are only a very small handful of words using SH, and changing them to SCH makes sense in every case.
  
  
• A new proposal (numbered 9) covering the RH digraph was added. The only change being proposed is that the digraph be standardized as pronounced SH in all cases.
  
  
• A new proposal (numbered 10) covering the ÇH digraph was added.

I ask all interested parties to read once again the full text of the proposals being made in the first posting in this thread. It is my hope and belief that the post now covers all of the Talossan digraphs, and that the proposals provide a sensible framework for their utilization going forward, without major impact to the language at all.

Hooligan

[Xhorxh Asmour]

Lord Hool's revised proposal sounds just fine to me, but I would insist on kicking MH out of our spelling system.

[Xhorxh Asmour]

The Berbers in Niger and Mali use the Roman alphabet and write GH for C'H (like Tamazight). As we have a mainly Berber/Southern Latin heritage and (almost) nothing to do with Celtic languages, why not use GH?

[Xhorxh Asmour]

Trigraphs are a waste of time, so why not use SH instead of SCH?
SCH is typically German, and the Talossan language is a Berber/Southern Latin language.
Moreover, Albanian, which has been heavily influenced by Latin, uses SH.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Although I've commented on bits and pieces of these proposals, for the sake of clarity I should outline where I stand on each of the proposals. Of course, I should have done this before the good baron went away on his junket. But it'll be here when he returns.

mha said:

1. Standardizing Digraph Separation.

I support this proposal.

2. The "N" Digraphs/Trigraphs.

I support the first two paragraphs of this proposal (although I wouldn't mind simply dropping the tilde from "iñen" instead of going to "ingen." I oppose the last paragraph because I favor retention of the historic and distinctive GÑH trigraph. And if GÑH is retained, the next-to-last paragraph (inserting apostrophes into words with the combination GN) is unnecessary.

3. The "L" Trigraph.

I oppose this proposal. It would eliminate another historic and very distinctive grapheme from the language (one of my favorites), and would affect the appearance of perhaps the single most widely-used and widely-recognised word in the language: glhetg. As I have said before, "glhetg" will be my "shibboleth" when it comes to reforms of Talossan.

4. The "c'h" Trigraph.

I support this, um, non-proposal.

5. The Two "th"-Sound Digraphs.

I oppose this proposal, for the reasons that I gave for GLH above. TG is one of the most uniquely distinctive graphemes in Talossan orthography.

6. The "S" Trigraph and Tetragraph.

I support these proposals.

7. The "X" Digraphs

I support these non-proposals.

8. The "M" Digraph

I support this non-proposal.

9. The "R" Digraph

I support this proposal, as expanded by my own post on the subject.

10. The "Ç" Digraph

I support this proposal.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

siervicul said:

john said:

German has the trigraph SCH which Talossan shares, and Breton has C'H for the glottal fricative, which is where Ben got the idea for Talossan. I don't think I know of any trigraphs for simple consonant sounds in any other writing systems.

Some trigraphs from other languages (some aren't really simple consonant sounds, but as you point out, neither are the Talossan ones):

I missed a pretty big one, which is a simple consonant sound (two different simple consonant sounds, actually, but only one at a time, depending on context). Irish Gaelic has BHF, which represents either /v/ or /w/.

When someone proposed abolishing the GNH and GLH graphemes a couple of years ago, Sir Tomás Gariçéir (sole member of the Order of the Purple Tongue and former CÚG president) had this reaction, which quite concisely sums up a lot of what I've been trying to say:

"Now this I must protest. :-) Like þ, ð, xh and -â, these two digraphs are a very strong, distinctive Talossanism which contribute a lot to written Talossan looking and feeling Talossan. Plus, I actually think they're cool and quite like them. I can't imagine Talossan without them. Ew."