Talk:ma'ay

@-sche, my copy of Mous just uses <'>, and that seems pretty unambiguous as the glottal stop. Why did you use <ˀ>? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:47, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I now see that the situation is rather more complex than I had realised. In the book you referenced, Mous made up his own orthography where /ʕ/ appeared to be ꜥ and a character exactly mirroring was the glottal stop (i.e., definitely not <ˀ>). Mous and others state that real usage is <'> for /ʔ/ and </> for /ʕ/, but perhaps the slashes would be technically problematic. If not, we should move this to ma'ay and 'ameeni to /ameeni. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:59, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Noticing that (some) cognates had a glottal in that position, and that the symbol Mous used wasn't an apostrophe, I interpreted it as ˀ. Looking at it now, I might guess he's using ʾ and ʿ, although he calls the things glottal stop and 'ayn, and a bit later glottal stop and pharyngeal fricative [...] with creaky voice (although I've confused myself as to which of those is ʾ and which is ʿ). Frøydis Nordbustad, whose Iraqw Grammar (1988) he refers to, has ma'aá (NB the number of as) and /ameeni; I figured simple ' and / were typewriter-ish substitutes for the seemingly more authoritative symbols of Mous. J. B. Maghway, Some Salient Linguistic Features of an Iraqw Narrative Text (1995) has what looks like ma´aay (NB the number of as) but is probably ma'aay, and uses slashes, as in na/ii "children". Paul Berger, Roland Kiessling, Iraqw texts (1998) has ma'ay and /ameeni. We do have a few entries with slashes (he/she, /b/tard), but the second of those demonstrates how nontrivial it is to link to them. I don't think we've ever had a language where they were part of the regular orthography. - -sche (discuss) 08:28, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

I have rather poor eyesight, so I think you've correctly identified the characters Mous is actually using there. I also apparently have poor memory, because it seems that I created /b/tard, so I should've known the technical limitations therein! I think that {{m}} and {{l}} should be able to handle those; I'll make a post about that in the GP. I'll also move these pages to the standard orthography, and make WT:About Iraqw to document it. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:31, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

OK, I've found confirmation of which symbols are which sounds (which I had managed to end up being confused about, above). Henry R. T. Muzale and Josephat M. Rugemalira, Researching and Documenting the Languages of Tanzania (2008): "Iraqw orthography includes two letters not used in writing Kiswa-hili, q for the voiceless uvular stop, and x for the voiceless velar fricative. It also uses symbols that are not even part of the Roman alphabet, including a slash / for the pharyngeal fricative, and an apostrophe ’ for the glottal stop (Mous et al. 2002)." (Hence, in half-circle orthography, ʾ = glottal stop and ʿ = fricative.) - -sche (discuss) 20:32, 2 April 2016 (UTC)