"Sagispeak"

[volleo6144]

I'm not aware of any evidence that /kw/ is a difficult consonant combination for the average human. Though I agree that if it collapsed to /k/ we'd have a problem. And we'd also have a problem if some speakers collapsed it to /w/ since that's the language-permitting alternative to /dʒɐt/ ("jat").

Romance languages usually use <qu> to denote just /k/ for some reason (<quinientos> /kinientos/ 'five hundred' in Spanish, <cinquante> /sãkãt/ 'fifty' in French), which might cause people to collapse it to /k/ if they don't realize.

I needed to verify that it was pretty common cross-linguistically, and I found this https://phoible.org/parameters which appears to be a ranking of all phonemes' popularity across all languages, which is pretty darn awesome if that's the case!

Yup! I've also seen it used in this series reviewing conlangs to verify that a preaspirated bilabial nasal /ʰm/ occurs in "approximately no languages".

...the initial "ng" problem...

Note that /ŋ/ is also only allowed to appear in the coda of a syllable in Mandarin Chinese (and yes, pinyin romanizes it as <ng>). Also Japanese phonotactics are pretty well-represented by the holes in the kana syllabary: there's a grand total of one consonant that's allowed to appear in the coda of a syllable, and the only consonant clusters that appear are /tʃ/ and /ts/, which are analyzed as allophones of /t/ except in loanwords.

[Dave Keenan]

Thanks for that review. I've added the following note to the Sagispeak table for Magrathean on the previous page.

qu = /kw/

Even if qu is collapsed to /k/, this will only be a problem for the two rare symbols (out of thousands) that consist of a 1-tina or 2-tina accent against a bare shaft (and of course their inverses). That's because /k/ is the sound of a right flag and can only occur as the onset of the final syllable, kai or kao, of a Sagispeak name, but any other use of tinas would follow a mispronounced ki or ko with another syllable.

[yahya.abdal-aziz]

Dave, is that magnificent table "Sagittal-SMuFL-Map.pdf" also available in other formats? I'm thinking particularly of Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or Word document formats, or their open source software equivalents.

I'd like to be able to print it out as a reference (ideally as an A3 wall chart), and those formats make it easy to have repeating heading rows and paginate, with the text at any desired - and readable! - size, using standard page sizes such as A4, A3 or US Letter. Not to mention tarting it up with a bit of colour!

[Dave Keenan]

Dave, is that magnificent table "Sagittal-SMuFL-Map.pdf" also available in other formats? I'm thinking particularly of Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or Word document formats, or their open source software equivalents.

I'd like to be able to print it out as a reference (ideally as an A3 wall chart), and those formats make it easy to have repeating heading rows and paginate, with the text at any desired - and readable! - size, using standard page sizes such as A4, A3 or US Letter. Not to mention tarting it up with a bit of colour!

Hi Yahya.

Douglas (@cmloegcmluin ) created it. He will be pleased at your characterisation of it, and your planned posterisation. It is magnificent isn't it.

Yes indeed. If you visit https://sagittal.org/ and scroll down to the fourth "shell point", you will find it in Excel and Libre Office spreadsheet formats.