Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds? It's not used by any Slavic languages AFAIK, some use z, some use ^ (and they used z in the past), others use cyrylic but nobody uses x for these. It's weird.
Also w for szcz makes no sense. Use r for "ja" while you're at it :)
Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to <Щ, щ> graphically.
> Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds?
I think it is something picked up from Esperanto. Traditional way to replace Esperanto-specific letters, when not supported, was to change it to a letter followed by an “h”, but there is also a more widely used method using “x” instead.
Щ is indeed read as "sht" in Bulgarian, but in Russian it would be read as a softer "sh" or mix between "sh" and "ch". If anything, maybe it can just be dropped in favour of plain "sh"?
From Ukrainian it gets turned into "shch". Which IMO sounds about right. Mainly because sh and ch are shorter sounds in English (ch can also be a little hard), but shch gets the point across.
This was also the historical Russian educated pronunciation; it only changed by the end of the 19th century.
Speaking as a Russian, I think that "shch" is close enough for an international conlang. It's not a sound that's particularly easy to learn or explain.
That's an option, but the big question is about "where it means sht".
Considering we're talking about constructed languages, whether "it's supposed to read `sh`" or "it's supposed to read `sht`" is defined by the author of the language.
On top of that, even coming to a conclusion on what it's supposed to read like means extrapolating it from present-day languages or from the now-dead languages. In a lot of cases, different languages will just have different readings. I.e. consider these words:
Plus there's the weird separate word [BG "sht" щателен - RU "tshch" тщательный].
Barring the loaned words from mostly Germanic origin, it looks like one language just sticks to "sht", while the other prefers "shch" and considers the "t" redundant. The interesting exception is the "що - что" pair, which is seems to preserve the T sound.
> Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to <Щ, щ> graphically.
Yes but then let's use R for "ja" :) This language seems like someone coming from cyrylic wanted to use latin letters, it's not good for Slavic languages that already used latin letters.
I'd personally lean towards using english spelling for some of these, which for example pinyin (chinese in latin alphabet) also adopted. It's pretty established already and would be easier to adopt by foreigners.
- ch (č) instead of cx
- sh (š) instead of sx
- zh (ž) instead of zx
- shch instead of wx
- kh instead of 'x' or 'ch' (kharkiv)
Additionally, you might correct the unfortunate use of i, y and j in slavic languages:
- j instead of gx or dž or dzh. It's already well established how to pronounce 'jamaica' worldwide
- y instead of the slavic j. There is no need for i and y to represent the same vowel
- ye instead of ě
- ty instead of ť
- dy instead of ď
- ny instead of ň
- rzh instead of ř
"J" is pronounced in at least 4 different ways (English, French/Portuguese, Spanish, German), each way being used in much more countries than I have mentioned. Each of the 4 ways is used by much more than 100 million people, in wide areas of the world.
I believe that most of them will pronounce Jamaica in their own way and different from the others. Thus there is no established rule about how to pronounce Jamaica.
Therefore, I believe that the only acceptable rule for the sound of "J" is the rule that is the oldest, i.e. to use "I" strictly for the vowel and "J" for its consonant form.
For the voiced form of "č", the best would be to use g with caron, for symmetry, even if currently few fonts include this character.
In my opinion "Y" should not be used for any sound of a Slavic language. It should better be reserved for its original sound, which is missing from the Slavic languages.
Are there Slavic words with separately pronounced "s" and "z"? It's quite a tongue-twister.
As for "X" it exists in some Slavic alphabets, for example in Slovak (but apparently only in loan words). In Polish it theoretically doesn't, but actually does (loan words use x when the word is new, and with time it's replaced with ks).
Mst and vzt aren't hard to pronounce? Pomst and wzwód are regular word.
As for s+z - interesting, in Polish there's no s+z pronounced separately. "Szadi" would be "z zadu" and you do a pause between the z letters. And if we have "from $PLACE" where place starts with S we change "z" to "ze" for exactly this reason. So "Z Rosji" and "Z Zimbabwe" but "Ze Szwecji".
In Russian, the combo s+z is also effectively pronounced as a geminated z. But it's still spelled "sz", because Russian orthography tends to be morphemic rather than phonetic. So from the perspective of reading familiarity, using "z" as a digraph marker would cause a lot of confusion on how to read it properly.
"x" at least has the advantage that it's foreign to almost everyone, and thus forces you to look up what the hell it's supposed to mean! But in general, I think that diacritics work much better for readability of Latin-based Slavic alphabets, with Czech being a decent starting point ("ch" aside).
As for the consonant clusters, they are easy to pronounce to Slavs, because we're used to them. Ask a native English speaker sometime what they think about a combo like "vzt" :)
(The reason why we ended up with these unusual consonant clusters is because of the loss of yers. For example, "pomst" and "мстить" are derived from proto-Slavic "*mьstь", where "ь" was originally short "e". This is also why vowels show up in the middle of those consonant clusters sometimes when words change such that the syllable that used to have a yer in it becomes stressed - as in Russian "месть".)
Also w for szcz makes no sense. Use r for "ja" while you're at it :)