www.talkcyprus.org

[Dhavlos]

i saw your website Cypriot, and thought that instead of having two letters representing a sound, that maybe a few other alphabets could be borrowed:

so, in the same order as your alphabet was(in terms of sounds), maybe:

a, b, č -ch, d, δ , e, f, g, γ , h, i, j, k, χ , l, m, n, ŋ -ng, o, ψ , ψš , r, s, š -sh, t, θ , u, ξ , kš, y, z, ζ

[The Cypriot]

My view is that we'd be making things needlessly complicated.

Our aim at the Academy is to celebrate Cypriot culture and make it as accessible as possible to non-Cypriots and those familiar only with the Latin alphabet and, perhaps, only the English language.

If we introduce non-familiar characters, deltas or thetas etc., into the script we create unnecessary barriers to their enjoyment and appreciation - which may mean they won't even try.

And our view is that our island's culture is so rich and unique it is worthy of serious consideration and serious celebration.

Try printing out one of the songs and showing it to a non-Cypriot friend and see how they get on when they read it. In my experience they do a far better job than a Cypriot whose thought processes have been muddled by the use of the Greek alphabet and who is expecting, instinctively, to see for example 'goru' written as 'korou'.

[Dhavlos]

ah, i see what you mean.

sorry, i was thinking on the lines of creating a 'cypriot alphabet'...that could have letters which are more clear in showing the language, half way betwee tnhe greek/latin alphabets.

[thebrix]

The Cypriot wrote: My view is that we'd be making things needlessly complicated.

Our aim at the Academy is to celebrate Cypriot culture and make it as accessible as possible to non-Cypriots and those familiar only with the Latin alphabet and, perhaps, only the English language.

If we introduce non-familiar characters, deltas or thetas etc., into the script we create unnecessary barriers to their enjoyment and appreciation - which may mean they won't even try.

And our view is that our island's culture is so rich and unique it is worthy of serious consideration and serious celebration.

Try printing out one of the songs and showing it to a non-Cypriot friend and see how they get on when they read it. In my experience they do a far better job than a Cypriot whose thought processes have been muddled by the use of the Greek alphabet and expecting, instinctively, to see for example 'goru' written as 'korou'.

Also, it is easier to type and reproduce accurately without code pages, Unicode or all the other rubbish that accompanies non-Latin or unusually-accented characters (because computing started out with the belief that people only wrote English or a few Western European languages ...).

A friend is a translator with particular expertise in "accent-less Polish". I wondered what on earth it was or why it was needed - but it turns out that Polish uses a number of non-standard accents and there is a big market for translations which only use a-z unambiguously - just missing out the accents doesn't work because there is a lot of ambiguity in the language.

BTW very interesting site!

[The Cypriot]

thebrix wrote:
Also, it is easier to type and reproduce accurately without code pages, Unicode or all the other rubbish that accompanies non-Latin or unusually-accented characters (because computing started out with the belief that people only wrote English or a few Western European languages ...).


That's a very good point, thebrix! Let's not create needless barriers to something as fabulous as:

O gatos j’ an eyerasen da nisha bu ishen eshi.
A cat may age but the claws it had it has.

Because we do Cyprus and the world a great disservice.