Talk:Colonial wireless alphabet/Archive 1

Radio Alphabet

Discussion moved from Talk:Language in the Twelve Colonies by Joe Beaudoin at 20:04, 10 October 2005 (EDT).

First is the Earth-international radio alphabet followed by the Colonial radio alphabet. Spellings (Juliett & Alfa) are per the official international version according to Wikipedia. Italics are the ones I think unlikely to be in the Colonial version. --Day 03:50, 10 September 2005 (EDT)

Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lime, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu.

A, Bravo², Constellation¹, Delta², E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, Nebula¹, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

Mini-Series
Hand of God

I have to go back and watch Hand of God but, I don't think Wilco is part of the phonetic alphabet. In radio transmissions it means "Will Comply" so you can see why it would be confusing to be used as a letter as well. --Talos 17:49, 23 September 2005 (EDT)

Agree. The Hand of God writers clearly used the NATO phonetic alphabet. --Peter Farago 17:56, 23 September 2005 (EDT)

The alphabet probably has astronomical terms for some of the letters, Pulsar, Quasar, and Universe for example. --Talos 18:11, 23 September 2005 (EDT)

Yeah. As I watched the rest of the episode, they used Wilco again and I was reminded of its normal usage. Thus I've removed it. I agree that Pulsar, Quasar and Universe are likely. I also bet they use Galaxy and maybe Star. However, I don't want to get into the business of pure speculation. --Day 18:19, 23 September 2005 (EDT)

Pronunciations

I changed some, but left others... They are still quite ununiform. I think, rather than using English words for syllables that sound like them, we should agree on how certain vowel sounds are transcribed, how certain consenants are transacribed, how syllables should be divided and how primary and secondary stress should be marked (or unmarked if we decide that for either of them). For instance:

"Yankee" should be 'YANG.kee' or 'YANG.ki', not 'YANG.key' because 'key' is how I'd transcribe the word "kay" (like, as in to do with islands or whatever it means). Now... 'YANG' has a whole new set of problems. It should probably be, actually, 'YEYNG.kee' though that's a bit dense... It's just that I wouldn't want to use 'a' for the vowel found in "yang", "play", "amoral", "they" and "payment". You can see it's not spelt the same way all the time in English. This gets trickey. I won't outline a whole system here, at least until people say how they feel about having one at all. Maybe we don't need to tell people how to pronounce these words.

Also, I think it would be really cool if we used the IPA in addition to an ad hoc guide, just to be as clear as possible. However, that's another issue, I think. --Day 20:43, 10 October 2005 (EDT)

We have Wikipedia's IPA template here, in case you want to use it. Joe imported it for me a while back.--Peter Farago 21:41, 10 October 2005 (EDT)

Unattested entries

I'm not sure we should list the unattested entries here, although a link to the NATO alphabet and the points on which terms are unlikely are useful. --Peter Farago 21:38, 10 October 2005 (EDT)

I trimmed the baseless speculation and improved episode citations. --Peter Farago 18:14, 19 November 2005 (EST)