Posted by Philip Newton on 3:11 7/17/2001
In reply to: (none)
How is î spelled in Verdurian script? The phonology page, under "Diacritics", talks about a "breve or short symbol" which "[i]n the modern language ... only appears on i".
Later on, under "History", subection "Diacritics", it mentions that "the diacritic [for î] is a reversed mole" -- but this "reversed mole" is not found in the list of diacritics under the main section "Diacritics" (nor is there a VERDURIAN COMBINING BREVE [or whatever] in the ConScript Unicode Registry page on Verdurian.
The font Maraille has a character i-breve as well as
I-breve (at positions 180 and 231, respectively). Since it was supposed
to map one-to-one to the font Verdurian, I had a look in it
and found the following two characters: ![[î]](http://newton.digitalspace.net/smallicirc.gif){kind=small}
for î and ![[Î]](http://newton.digitalspace.net/bigicirc.gif){kind=small}
for Î. These do look like a
Verdurian i with "a reversed mole" -- but I do not see
how they derive from the alphabet listed on the phonology page, nor the
CSUR entry. Is there, perhaps, a letter VERDURIAN (SMALL/CAPITAL)
LETTER I WITH BREVE missing, or a VERDURIAN COMBINING BREVE? VERDURIAN
(SMALL/CAPITAL) LETTER I BREVE is the i brevë which is
usually transliterated y, not the î.
Since the spelling of Verdurian is said to be "highly phonemic" (in the section on letterforms) and the distinction between i and î is shown to be phonemic, I would expect this distinction to be representable in the script.
Cheers,
Philip.
It's definitely missing from the CSUR page. I don't know what happened there, and I think my correspondance with Michael Everson is in the PC mail file I can't get to right now. I know we looked at everything in Maraille, so either we both lost it, or made some sort of decision not to include it.
What's really odd is that the CSUR page does have a u with breve! (They're in Maraille, but I've never actually used them... except in the numbers database.) That makes me think that Michael thought that "i-breve" and "i-with-breve" were the same thing.
I should update the diacritics picture to include the breve.
