From: schuyler@violin.cis.ohio-state.edu (Carlton Schuyler)
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Organization: The Ohio State University, Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 17:50:15 GMT

In article <167C112344.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU> JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
>Indeed, modifications such as the distinction of i versus j and u versus
>v, as well as addition of z from Greek and w from elsewhere have added to
>the flexibility and utility of our so called 'Roman' alphabet, as have
>diacritics (like that lovely Scandinavian bullet hole above the letter a),
>all of which your PC, my clone, and any Mac can handle gracefully, were it
>not the case that IBM main frames used by so many of us as a communication
>link are too brain dead to accommodate anything beyond 128 ASCII (all right,
>EBCDIC fr gawds sake!).  Let's hear it for putting the thorn back in English
>where it has belonged for over a millenium!
>
... And the Eth!!  But actually, digraphs seem to be a pretty good
idea.  There are so many different sounds around that to have a single
symbol for every one would lead to a HUGE character set.  Why not
stick to the digraphs that speakers of various languages have devised,
and even introduce new ones (or map otherwise useless letters to
appropriate sounds as Albanian [q, x], Quechua [q] have done).

A good example of the use of digraphs is in Hungarian, where the
letter y is used to make palatal consonants out of nonpalatals

	gy, ty, ny are palatal (I don't know which of these are
                                coronal; I suspect that gy is not and
                                the other two are)
	ly  probably was once a palatalized lateral, but now is
            pronounced as a palatal glide)

I can't think of a whole lot of words (proper names excluded) which
have a standalone y.  The symbol used for the palatal glide is j.
There are more digraphs:

	cs sz zs dzs  are  ch, s (Hungarian s = sh), zh, g/j/dzh in one
                      commonly used transliteration scheme. 

In all the cases above, the letters in the digraph can never (or
nearly never) occur adjacent to each other.

According to which language you're talking about, constraints on the
distribution of sounds will lead to different possibilities for
digraphs.  As Hungarian shows, it's possible to come up with "logical"
mappings which lead to unambiguous phonological representations.

The English system of using th for (theta or thorn) is interesting
when you look at the pronunciation of a lot of speakers of Indian
English.  They may pronounce th as a distributed voiceless aspirated
dental stop.  Which is pretty much what "th" looks like to me.  Of
course, the may pronounce standalone t as a retroflex voiceless stop,
Which is another problem.  But my point, I guess, is that since the
English use of th for the interdental fricative does correspond
"logically" to what the sound actually resembles, there is a dialect
of English which does not have (theta) in which the orthography
nevertheless makes a kind of "sense".  Who follows this train of
thought??  Perhaps there are other languages in which orthographies
make similar sense.  Polish comes immediately to mind (when thinking
about the distinction in point of articulation for sz, si, and s', for
instance), although I don't know how to pronounce Polish, so never
mind.

I realize this is not the most well-written article, but I hope
someone follows well enough to see what I'm driving at.