January 1, 2016 — Fiat Lingua

George Corley is currently a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with research interests in phonology, Chinese, and minority languages. He also has a strong personal interest in invented languages (conlangs), which has led him to host and produce Conlangery, a monthly podcast on the subject, and to become Vice-President of the Language Creation Society.

Abstract

In this essay George Corley expands on his “Design Parameters for Romanization” (Corley 2011), defining five parameters for designing and discussing conlang romanizations: elegance, accessibility, aesthetics, internal history, and technical factors. He applies this framework in a detailed discussion of his own process designing the romanization for his current conlang, Middle Pahran. He pays special attention to overspecifying the phonology for accessibility, and to the compromises he made due to the technical limitations of the software he uses.

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