Vadi: Difference between revisions

The ''Širkattarnaft'' was insufficient in representing Vadi phonology and phonotactics, as evidenced by the numerous digraphs, spelling anomalies and irregularities found throughout the texts.  Schumann and Iyyaħmi use two different Romanized systems for glossing purposes.  Schumann's is based on slightly modified version of Spanish, as it is his native language and moreover, he feels the Spanish orthography represents the phonology of Vadi accurately.   

A few notes regarding Iyyaħmi's Romanization: there are five digraphs, namely <bf>, <fsl>, <sš>, and  <dfš> with its alternate <dft>.  Iyyaħmi's system diverges from the Ammerkast system, which was designed to be phonemic.  In fact, "Ammerkast" derives from "Americanist", a phonetic orthographic alternative to IPA widely used in linguistic literature for Native American, Semitic, Sumerian and other ancient Near Eastern languages.  Although Iyyaħmi acknowledges that his modified system breaks the Ammerkast's original purpose to employ a one character-to-sound representation, the modifications map directly to the way the native ''Širkattarnaft'' was used by the Vadi litigants.  The litigants' use of the ''Širkattarnaft'' was quite unorthodox, and part of the reason for this is that they used plenty of digraphs to represent sounds not found in the ''Širkattarnaft'', as well as to indicate consonantal mutations and other sandhi processes that occurred in their language.  Because this orthography maps more closely to how the litigants used the  ''Širkattarnaft'', Iyyaħmi believes it is more suitable in reconstructing Vadi phonology phonotactics.

Tashunka developed a different transcription system, also based on the Americanist system.  His system incorporates the phonemes discovered by Iyyaħmi, but he was not concerned with the grapheme linkages of Iyyaħmi's system.

Both Iyyaħmi and Schumann do employ IPA to represent the actual phonology of the textual material, but even here both Vadists diverge, as the IPA of Iyyaħmi reflects his more recent work on how the ''Širkattarnaft'' was used to represent Vadi phonology and phonotactics, whereas Schumann maintains Iyyaħmi's analyses are problematic.  Today, however, the consensus among Vadists is that Iyyaħmi's analyses are more accurate.

Nevertheless, Schumann's system is more widespread as his work on Vadi started in late 1970, whereas Iyyaħmi, although quite prolific, began his work much more recently after finishing his post-doc in 2012.  In this article, Schumann's Romanization will be used for glossing where there is little divergence between his and Iyyaħmi's samples.  However, if there are significant discrepancies, both Romanizations will be represented together with Schumann's appearing first, separated by a slash before Iyyaħmi's.  Where Tashunka's system is used alongside the other two Vadists, it will appear after Iyyaħmi's, otherwise it will explicitly noted.