On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:47:23 -0600, Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
On Feb 21, 2019, at 12:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
The one other place where case matters is in distinguishing between ng+H and n+gh. I don’t think there are any word pairs where the difference would cause confusion, but that doesn’t mean there never will be.
For example, nobody is going to think that NENGHEP is nengHep, or that VENGHOM is venghom if they know the words nenghep and vengHom.
Perhaps the Esperanto 'x-convention' could be suitably adopted here, and for the same reason that it is used in Esperanto: 'x' isn't a letter in the alphabet. Thus, H -> hx and Q -> qx, and your examples become nenghep and venghxom. (side note: Esperanto has six letters that have diacritics; without the diacritics, they are indistinguishable from six other letters in the Esperanto alphabet. So, if you're using a keyboard that doesn't support the Esperanto diacritics, you use the 'matching' undiacritic-ized letter followed by 'x' to indicate the diacritic-ized letter.)
Using qh for Q could be problematic in a similar way for distinguishing q+H from Q. For example, is baqha' baqHa' or baQa'?
And these are baqhxa' and baqxa' respectively.
An encoding like xifan hol or a system with diacritics would avoid these issues.
FWIW I found SuStel’s example texts perfectly readable, but it does seem that old habits are hard to break (I saw a “DaH” in there rather than “Dah”, for example.) Also, I wonder, since qaghwI' can’t exactly be capital or lowercase, if the vowel following a qaghwI' in a word that begins with qaghwI' should be the one to be capitalized instead. For example:
Qu' dataghdi' 'Aktu' Mellota' je tikaw.