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

[Owen Cook]

2008/6/25 Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com> rug scrifa:
> At 16:26 +0300 2008-06-25, Owen Cook wrote:
>
>>On a more philosophical basis, are we studiously trying to avoid
>>departing from the SWF in concept, or fixing it where it made the
>>wrong decision on political grounds?
>
> I'd just as soon not deviate where not necessary.
>
>>If the former, then I imagine we must also keep the main form variants
>>including <hw> and <kw>. We can't get rid of them, they're in the SWF.
>
> I don't believe we will get anywhere proscribing them -- evidently
> some people feel as strongly about them as we do about traditional
> graphs. We can say (perhaps in a note) that KS permits their use,
> that we as editors discourage them (and why). And then we won't use
> them.

Yowzers! Well, if the remit of our current project is that modest,
then I suppose we've got to keep the rest of the SWF's
all-things-to-all-peopleness. I never thought <hw> would ever be
admitted into KS. All right then Michael, let's bury the hatchet on
the particular choice of diacritic. As I said before, if umbrella
graphs are out, then we presumably need a diacritic for <y>. You argue
we'll need the same diacritic for <e>. For technical reasons <ÿ> and
<í> are cool with everybody; I like <ý> (that's y-acute), but I'll
accept that it finishes third in the pecking order. After we've
decided how to sort out <y> and <i> more generally, then we can
revisit whether it's right to use <ÿ> and <ë>, or <í> and <é>. Perhaps
in the end you'll see the beauty of y-acute, but I recognize this is a
long shot. There are more important things for us to be worrying
about.

Gorhemynadow a'n gwelha,
~~Owen

PS: Privately, I'm also going to start making a list of things that
the SWF should have taken a courageous stand on, and failed to.

> That seems a lot more like ditching the SWF entirely. The KK
> contingent really hated <beis> and as I said they nearly won <bys>
> everywhere (with <y> as an umbrella graph for [i:]~[e:]. We fought
> VERY hard to gain <bes>, and won it. It'd be churlish to dump bys/bes
> for beis at this point.
> --
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com