Understanding Seesh Romanization
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A guide to the Romanization of the Seeshite languages.
This public article was written by [Deactivated User] on 27 Apr 2022, 23:25.
[comments] shrm The Seeshite language family is very orthographically diverse and is written with anywhere from two to four systems. All things considered, I'm just going to say there's three: the romanization, Classical Beadwork, and Modern Seesh. Starting off easy, there's the romanization. This system is used as a teaching tool, and for linguistic documentation and transcription. Most sounds and glyphs should be familiar to anyone with knowledge of the Latin alphabet (which I think includes you), so it'd just be easier to go over everything that wouldn't be pronounced exactly as you'd expect. For a start, Seeshite languages have phonemic stress, which means that the meaning of a word or phrase can change depending on where the stress it placed. This is familiar to English speakers (if you emphasize the 'I' in 'I'm here', that has a different implication then stressing the 'here' in 'I'm here'), but what might not be as familiar is stress being notated. Stress in Seeshite romanization systems is notated by placing a macron (which looks like this 'ā') over a letter. There's one more layer of complication here which is that there's phonemic vowel length in all Seeshite languages, and because stacking diacritics looks awful, and there aren't diphthongs in any form of Seesh, long vowels are notated as two vowels next to each other. There are four digraphs in the Seesh romanization: sh, zh, ts, dz. Sh and zh are used just for familiarity and to make Seeshite languages easier to write with an English keyboard, and the 'ts' and 'dz' digraphs are self-explanatory. Lastly, there's three special symbols: ɸ, β, and ʙ. 'ɸ' can be pronounced like an 'f' in English and still be comprehensible to speaker, though the β and ʙ have to be articulated accurately. β should be familiar to Spanish speakers or learners, it's that half-b-half-v sound in 'Viernes', but ʙ is a bit of a wildcard. ʙ, is a bilabial trill and there's nothing I call you that's going to make this easier to pronounce.
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