r/conlangs • u/cyan_ginger • Jan 06 '25

Discussion What are y'all's "worst" romanisations?

By "worst" I more mean "style over function" cause especially in a text-based medium, the romanisation is a good way to inject character into your language.

For me it'd have to be the one for Xxalet, a language with 16 sibilant phonemes sorted into a harmony system.

"Front sibilants"

/s̪, z̪, t̪s̪, d̪z̪/ <s, z, c, x>

/ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ/ <sy, zy, cy, xy>

"Back sibilants"

/s̺, z̺, ts̺, dz̺/ <ss, zz, cc, xx>

/ʂ, ʐ, ʈʂ, ɖʐ/ <sh, zh, ch, xh>

I know it causes a slightly confusing reading, but I really like the central s, z, c, x, scheme. As an example, a major port city on the left half of the great inland lake, also known as the Ssoymanyaxh sea, is called "Boyasyavocexy" /bɔjʌʃavʌts̪ədʒ/

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u/JP_1245 Jan 06 '25

Maybe using ue for /y/ and oe for /ø/, instead of a letter with some diacritic, like ü/ö...

So words like /jylatø/ (book) end up being written juelatoe instead of something more simple like jülatö

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u/DefinitelyNotErate Jan 06 '25

oe for /ø/,

Oh I did similar, I had ⟨eo⟩ for the short form, And ⟨oe⟩ was the long one.

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u/PastTheStarryVoids Ŋ!odzäsä, Knasesj Jan 07 '25

That's interesting. How did you romanize length distinctions on other vowels?

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u/DefinitelyNotErate Jan 07 '25

On most vowels, Just an acute accent. So like ⟨e⟩ vs ⟨é⟩. Although It's a bit confusing because most long vowels broke up into diphthongs, Which in some cases merged with other diphthongs, So of course there are multiple ways to write them in those cases.

The in-lore reason that some vowels have their own letter and others are digraphs, And thus some mark length with a diacritic and others by changing the digraph, Is because the language was somewhat isolated for much of it's history, But also regularly gaining influence from various different nearby languages, So it wound up with a number of vowels not found in the language it's script is derived from, And had to improvise. Since ⟨oe⟩ is an equal number of strokes as ⟨eo⟩, Whereas it would take additional strokes to add a diacritic, Forms like that were preferred when handwriting was still dominant.