邪悪歌 wrote:a simple enough reason for most conlangers, which could very well've been the reasoning here, is that many conlangs probably don't use 'junk letters' like x, q, and c and whatnot because they don't have any default sound associated with them, so if all the other letters are used for something, then whatever's left over can be used for extra sounds if you're not one for using digraphs or accents or whatever... case in point pin-yin used q and x for an extra set of sounds, võro uses q as a glottal stop, many times it's used for the ipa equiv /q/ and in latin based languages it's not even found without a u (so technically the letter would be 'qu') that's either pronounced as k or kw
But a lot of these creative reuses aren't as odd as they seem as first glance.
Q was likely influenced by its use for [c] in the Albanian alphabet, which in turn can be related to the widespread use of
q(
u) for [k] (particularly before front vowels).
X has long been used for [ʃ] in various Romance languages, so extending it to [ɕ] hardly even seems worth noting.
邪悪歌 wrote:it's all a matter of what's useful in that language
Not really, because I regularly see this odd assignments when there's a perfectly good character available, like using
w to represent [u:] when
u hasn't been used for anything. (Unlike in, say, Welsh, where
u is /ɨ/ due to a historical vowel shift parallel to that which took place in Gallo-Romance.)
But this does prompt another important question, which is: Why design a distinctive Latin-based orthography anyway? Except in cases where the conculture is explicitly located on Earth, I tend to assume that what we are really dealing with are
transcriptions of whatever the actual writing system would be for the language. So utility should really be of paramount importance. Despite the fact that the letter assignments of Pinyin are only slightly unusual from a pan-European point of view, they cause endless trouble for Chinese abroad--to the degree that many end up using "misspelled" versions of their name that are less liable to be mispronounced.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons