[Spellyans] Front unrounded vowels, was: The quantity system

[Michael Everson]

At 19:26 +0300 2008-06-24, Owen Cook wrote:
>2008/6/24 Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>:
>  >> (and remember, here we need the accent on <ÿ> to show length)
>  >
>  > That's not correct.
>
>Yes it is. We have 'jyn' in KS, don't we?

My mistake.

>Although you may be right, that got shot down in the SWF, which has
>'jynn' for everybody.

Not for us ;-) That's one of the errors of the SWF.

>  > We could adopt <beis>, but that would introduce a pretty massive systemic
>>  difference between KS and the SWF. I don't think that is wise. The diaeresis
>>  is not really very obtrusive, however, and diacritiphobes can omit them if
>>  they must.
>
>The diaeresis looks terrible. This is a really 
>big set of words, so why do we need to have 
>mounds of diaereses which indicate neither a 
>vowel on hiatus (as in Welsh, inter alia) nor 
>umlaut (as in German, inter alia) nor a centre 
>unrounded vowel (as in Luxembourgish or 
>Albanian) nor any other value for a diaeresis 
>that I've ever come across.

Actually, I think I've caught you here. ;-) 
Consider German and its dialects. <ö> is (in 
practice if not in theory) an umbrella graph for 
/ø/~/e/ (schön [Sø:n]~[Se:n]) and <ü> is an 
umbrella graph for /y/~/i/ (grün 
/gry:n]~[gri:n]). So what we propose here is that 
<ÿ> and <ë> are both umbrella graphs for 
[i:]~[e:].

>I'm a diacriticophile, but I've never liked this 
>use of the diaeresis. The acute accent would 
>make me much, much happier.

In my judgement the acute accent would be 
interpreted as a stress mark by most readers. And 
I think the two little dots are really not very 
obtrusive. But the choice here is one of 
character set and many many many fonts: While 
Windows has both y-acute and y-diaeresis, the 
classic Mac OS has only y-diaeresis.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com