"Sagispeak"

[Dave Keenan]

Okay, but Magratheans are out of scope for now...

Yeah. It's good that you at least considered them enough to show that whatever scheme we come up with for the new Olympians, does not lock out possible solutions for the Magratheans. We certainly shouldn't try to finalise the Magratheans now.

What did you think of my more serious proposal to use apostrophes to break double vowels, e.g. "mo'ovai" for

I think that's an excellent idea. But I wonder if we should instead consider giving the the schisma diacritics a consonant (e.g. m or b) and no consonant for the minas, or claw back a consonant from the many allowed for "j" (as you pointed out).

And of adding “sch” to the table for German “sh” sound, as long as we’re adding “tsh” for French “ch” sound.

Such a good idea, that I did it as soon as I read it.

[cmloegcmluin]

I wonder if we should instead consider giving the the schisma diacritics a consonant (e.g. m or b) and no consonant for the minas

Aw, man! If reexamining the schisma and schisminas is on the table, we can have some fun...

or claw back a consonant from the many allowed for "j" (as you pointed out)

I wish we could... but I think the constraints laid out at the beginning are good - across the most widely spoken languages using the Latin alphabet, we should avoid using letters with common overlapping pronunciations.

So I really want to reduce the number of letters the minas consume from two to one. "m" for mina is a gimme. While I am a fan of the "b" for bi-mina, I don't think it's worth a letter. Surely somehow we can use two "m"s for two minas. When we double flags we double the consonant as a single cluster; = "p", = "pp". And then we have the layer where the second of the two doubled consonants converts to an "h" to alter the pronunciation of the remaining consonant to an otherwise unused pronunciation: "pp" -> "ph" which sounds like /f/. And in cases where a language doesn't have the resultant pronunciation, a fallback is to insert an "a" between the two consonants, so that "ph" can be pronounced (and maybe also spelled?) "pah", as in "pahao". Well, a doubled "m" has two problems, though; "mm" can -> "mh", but : 1) neither "mm" nor "mh" ever appear as an initial consonant cluster for syllables, and 2) neither "mm" nor "mh" alter the pronunciation from "m". However! Why not leverage the effect of the a-insertion, and let the bi-mina be represented by "mah"? It won't be ambiguous with the "h"s used for the main symbols because those are always followed by "ao" or "ai".

With the "b" freed, we can use that for the schismina. I don't have a visual or aural mnemonic or anything, but it's available.

Finally, it occurs to me that we haven't used q. I suppose we'd end up with "qui" and "quo" in that case; putting a "q" in front of any other vowel, at least in English, is almost always in foreign words, like "qi" and "Qatar" and "qoph"... but since we haven't used "u" for anything else yet, so it doesn't bother me. It's an extra letter, and also an extra phoneme in the pronunciation (/kw/) but since it would be rarely used, maybe that's okay. Plus, I think the "qu" sound appears often in words that connote little things, like "quiet", "quaint", "quantum", that it helps a tad. So what if the Magratheans used the lone i and o for half-tinas, and qui and quo for full tinas? And the tri-mina could be "mahah".

tinas    up           down
0.5      i            o
1.0      qui          quo
1.5      iqui         oquo
2.0      quiqui       quoquo
2.5      iquiqui      oquoquo

3.0      mi           mo

3.5      imi          omo
4.0      quimi        quomo
4.5      iquimi       oquomo
5.0      quiquimi     quoquomo
5.5      iquiquimi    oquoquomo

6.0      mahi         maho

6.5      imahi        omaho
7.0      quimahi      quomaho
7.5      iquimahi     oquomaho
8.0      quiquimahi   quoquomaho
8.5      iquiquimahi  oquoquomaho

9.0      mahahi       mahaho

9.5      imahahi      omahaho

[Dave Keenan]

"m" for mina is a gimme. ... Surely somehow we can use two "m"s for two minas.
...
With the "b" freed, we can use that for the schismina. I don't have a visual or aural mnemonic or anything, but it's available.
...
So what if the Magratheans used the lone i and o for half-tinas, and qui and quo for full tinas? And the tri-mina could be "mahah".

Brilliant! Thanks!

Why not just momo and mimi for double minas and momomo and mimimi for triple minas?

I have some mnemonics for bi and bo for the 5-schisma diacritics:
1. The consonants "b" and "p" both name prime-5 components. "b" and "p" are almost the same phoneme, except that "b" is voiced and "p" is not.
2. The untempered 5-schisma is about 2 cents, a bi-cent.

I have updated the posts on pages 2 and 3 of this topic, that give the full pronunciation scheme.

[cmloegcmluin]

Sweet, I'm glad you like it!

Why not just momo and mimi for double minas and momomo and mimimi for triple minas?

Actually I did first consider "momo", "mimi", "momomo", and "mimimi", but I thought that the use of the "a"s and the "h"s had a few advantages:

1. it more closely follows the patterns laid out for the main symbols when doubling elements;
2. the repeated syllables are less natural, at least in English (and dare I say sillier);
3. the repeated syllables are harder to differentiate when spoken ("wait, was that a "mimi" or a "mimimi"?)

Of course the drawback is that it's more complex to remember "mi" -> "mahi" -> "mahahi".

Anyway, I don't feel strongly about the issue. Perhaps someone else could chime in. Or perhaps both options could be accepted.

[Dave Keenan]

Of course the drawback is that it's more complex to remember "mi" -> "mahi" -> "mahahi".

Right. It's likely to be so little used, that I think anyone who learns that one of them is pronounced "mi" will just assume that two will be "mimi". There is no "mimimi" in Olympian, or in any notation so far.

[cmloegcmluin]

“Mimi” works for me. Let’s go with that. Really I only proposed the versions with “a” and “h” because I thought they’d be more likely to be what y’all wanted, not because I preferred them.

[cmloegcmluin]

So the final table for the Magrathean extension is:

tinas	sagispeak	sagispeak	symbol	symbol
	prefix	prefix	up	down
	up	down
0.5	i	o
1.0	qui	quo			qu = /kw/
1.5	iqui	oquo
2.0	quiqui	quoquo
2.5	iquiqui	oquoquo
3.0	mi	mo
3.5	imi	omo
4.0	quimi	quomo
4.5	iquimi	oquomo
5.0	quiquimi	quoquomo
5.5	iquiquimi	oquoquomo
6.0	mimi	momo
6.5	imimi	omomo
7.0	quimimi	quomomo
7.5	iquimimi	oquomomo
8.0	quiquimimi	quoquomomo
8.5	iquiquimimi	oquoquomomo
9.0	mimimi	momomo
9.5	imimimi	omomomo

If a symbol contains no flags, i.e., only accents and a bare shaft, then the last vowel "o" or "i" becomes "ao" or "ai" to indicate the overall direction of the symbol (the direction of the bare shaft).

The main Sagispeak article is here: viewtopic.php?p=293#p293

There is more information on Magrathean and tinas here: viewtopic.php?p=2714#p2714

[Dave Keenan]

Thanks for the update with the new smilies.

I added some links and the note (adapted from the main article): "If a symbol contains no flags, i.e., only accents and a bare shaft, then the last vowel "o" or "i" becomes "ao" or "ai" to indicate the overall direction of the symbol (the direction of the bare shaft)."

I've been thinking about how, due to the "qu"s, many of those sagispeak tina names are embarrassingly long, when considering what tiny pitch alterations they represent. And I've been thinking about how "qu" is not a simple consonant but a blend /kw/, which can be difficult for some non-English speakers, who may tend to pronounce it as simply /k/, in which case sounds the same as  , namely "kai".

The only other consonant letters of the Modern Latin alphabet that we haven't used yet in Sagispeak are "c", "h", "l", "x" and "y". Except that we've used "h" in combination with other consonants, for double flags. And we've allowed the obvious pronunciations of "h", "l" and "y" as possible pronunciations of "j", "r" and "j" respectively. The obvious pronunciations of "c" are the same as those for "k" and "s". And "x" is typically pronounced the same as "z" (at the start of a word) or as "kh" = /x/ or as another awkward (except at the end of a word) blend "ks".

And when the comma punctuation symbol "," must be reserved as a delimiter, we allow "c" (for comma) as the ASCII shorthand character for the downward mina accent. But the mina's Sagispeak consonant sound remains "m".

If we wanted a common non-blended consonant sound for the 1-tina horn etc, that we haven't already allowed as a possible pronunciation of any letter used so far, all I can think of is "th", pronounced as either unvoiced /θ/ or voiced /ð/.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmo ... with_audio

Since is tao [Edit: tai], if was pronounced "thao" [thai] it could be confused with |)), since "h" means double-flag elsewhere, but there is no such flag combination as |)). If there were a lot of" thao"s and "thai"s it could start to sound like the King James Bible. And of course, spelling it as "th" wouldn't solve the long-spellings problem.

But maybe all this suggests to you (dear reader) some way of improving the Sagispeak for the tinas without making anything worse for the lower precision levels. Douglas, I know you've thought a lot about phonemes and the spelling of them.
https://cmloegcmluin.wordpress.com/2011 ... scription/
https://cmloegcmluin.wordpress.com/2012 ... -phonemes/
It looks like these guys stole your graph and data without attribution:
https://thelanguagenerds.com/most-commo ... n-english/

BTW, I just added the following to my WinCompose definitions:
<Multi_key> <z> <z> : "ʒ" U0292 # LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH
This lets me write the IPA for one of the allowed sounds for "j" in sagispeak, namely /dʒ/.

[cmloegcmluin]

I added some links and the note (adapted from the main article): "If a symbol contains no flags, i.e., only accents and a bare shaft, then the last vowel "o" or "i" becomes "ao" or "ai" to indicate the overall direction of the symbol (the direction of the bare shaft)."

Thanks for reminding me of that rule. I might have forgotten it in the code.

I've been thinking about how, due to the "qu"s, many of those sagispeak tina names are embarrassingly long, when considering what tiny pitch alterations they represent.

I thought the idea here was that sure, the 2-letter "qu" was cumbersome, but hey, it's Magrathean; it gets the dregs.

Here's what I said in defense of "qu" when I first introduced it:

Finally, it occurs to me that we haven't used q. I suppose we'd end up with "qui" and "quo" in that case; putting a "q" in front of any other vowel, at least in English, is almost always in foreign words, like "qi" and "Qatar" and "qoph"... but since we haven't used "u" for anything else yet, so it doesn't bother me. It's an extra letter, and also an extra phoneme in the pronunciation (/kw/) but since it would be rarely used, maybe that's okay. Plus, I think the "qu" sound appears often in words that connote little things, like "quiet", "quaint", "quantum", that it helps a tad.

And I've been thinking about how "qu" is not a simple consonant but a blend /kw/, which can be difficult for some non-English speakers, who may tend to pronounce it as simply /k/, in which case sounds the same as  , namely "kai".

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").

If we wanted a common non-blended consonant sound for the 1-tina horn etc, that we haven't already allowed as a possible pronunciation of any letter used so far, all I can think of is "th", pronounced as either unvoiced /θ/ or voiced /ð/.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmo ... with_audio

Since is tao, if was pronounced "thao" it could be confused with |)), since "h" means double-flag elsewhere, but there is no such flag combination as |)). If there were a lot of" thao"s and "thi"s it could start to sound like the King James Bible. And of course, spelling it as "th" wouldn't solve the long-spellings problem.

I coulda' sworn we'd scorned thorn, but I can't dig up any evidence of it. So here's a link to a Quora page where people unanimously pile on responses saying it's the most idiosyncratic sound to English: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most- ... -languages Those "th" sounds are exotic to most humans. Us Anglophones are the weirdos in this case. That's why I never recommended them and would have argued against them if they came up.

One thing "th" has going for it is its presence in the word "Magrathean", though, which I only mention because "mi" has the initial "m" from it, too.

It looks like these guys stole your graph and data without attribution:
https://thelanguagenerds.com/most-commo ... n-english/

Whoa, I'm not sure if that's better or worse than when I do find it cited in actual academic papers! Nice find. I outta' pester them about it.

What else could we do? Back in this post I proposed a vowels-only approach, which Dave wasn't a fan of (unless he meant that he loves singing Old MacDonald had a farm?)

A fairly wild suggestion occurs to me. How about the "ng" sound, /ŋ/? It wouldn't solve the 2-letter problem, it may still have issues of collapsing into an existing sound such as /n/ or /g/, and it isn't even a productive initial consonant in English (meaning no natural English words begin with this sound, which is a problem because some Sagispeak would). But it is at least a technically distinct phoneme where /kw/ is a combination of two we're already using. 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! And /ŋ/ comes up at position 14 on that list, which ain't bad at all, and its Wikipedia article has examples for a ton of languages. If you wanted to solve the initial "ng" problem, you could throw an "e" in front of it, but then I think that makes it a bit harder to distinguish the dotted-tina accents from undotted ones.

The only other thing I can think of is the voiceless w /ʍ/ in some words which start with "wh", which some English speakers distinguish, but that turns up at the very bottom of that Phoible list, and its Wikipedia article has almost no examples in other languages. And I don't think it's productive with the vowel "o", i.e. "who" is not going to read /ʍoʊ/ but /hu:/.

I really don't think we're gonna' get any better than "qu" /kw/ myself, but if anyone beats it, happy to make the updates.

[Dave Keenan]

Dregs it must be. Even alternative letters and pronunciations for Spartan symbols must take precedence over Magrathean.

This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-nativ ... of_English
agrees with you, that we should not use "th" = /θ/ or /ð/ and gives no evidence of difficulty with "qu" = /kw/. And "qu" is better than "ng" = /ŋ/ because of the word starting problem. So "qu" it is. Thanks for making one more run around the flagpole on that one.