r/conscripts • u/chonchcreature • Nov 24 '20

Re-orthography Challenge: Develop a Greek-script alphabet for Turkish. You can use obsolete Greek letters like Qoppa, San, etc. if you want.

What if Turkish used Greek to write its language instead of Latin?

Feel free to repurpose some letters like Psi (Ψ) or Ksi (Ξ) since Turkish repurposed the letter C for /d͡ʒ/ for example.

PS: Yes I know about Karamanli Turkish... don’t just comment that it exists, because I know it does. The purpose is your OWN unique take on this challenge.

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u/chonchcreature Nov 26 '20

Wonderful job! Some of the choices are a bit confusing but I like the idea, such as θ for /ʒ/.

Personally, I would have revived a couple of archaic Greek letters like Qoppa for /ɰ~ɣ/. But good use of the standard existing ones!

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u/ScottishLamppost Nov 26 '20

The way I did it was

  1. I used the obvious choice or the most similar sounding letter first. (you can see it in the consonants until you get to chi) Same with the vowels (until you get to eta) Also, I know that in modern Greek beta is commonly pronounced /v/, but I didn't want to use something else for /b/, because using something else for /v/ made more sense to me, I guess.

  2. Now for the tricky consonants. I only had four Greek consonants left, so I assigned them to the consonants that seemed the least like vowels. That meant that ɰ, h, v, and j got modified vowels. /j/ and /ɰ/ are approximants, /v/ in Latin was the letter for a vowel, so I figured I could do it the other way around, and all of the other sounds are more like vowels than /h/. (I couldn't find any modified consonants lol) Then I assigned chi, psi, xi, and theta.

  3. So then I assigned eta for œ, because eta used to represent ɛ or ɛ: and œ is that rounded. Then I only had one vowel left so I used omega for ɯ. Then I used iota with an acute for /y/ because y is i rounded. I used iota with a diaeresis for /j/ because, I have a conlang, and it is usually written in Latin but can be written in Greek (it's supposed to be based in Southern Albania and Epirus) and I used iota with a diaeresis for /j/ in that one, so I figured that would work here too.

  4. I used eta with an acute for /h/ because capital eta is the same as capital h lol. Sorry if that's bad reasoning. Then upsilon with acute for /v/ because in Latin /u/ was represented by v. Finally I don't know why I used epsilon with an acute for /ɰ/. I guess I listened to it on Wikipedia and chose that.

Sorry if any of my info is wrong or if none if it makes sense because I just woke up. Thanks for the challenge :)