The Illustrious Ya

Is it too much for Che Conlangua to ask that you come up with some reasonably sane roman orthography for your conlang? Che has seen the best, he's seen the worst; he's created both good and bad orthographies in his time. As an avid conlanger and reader of others' conlangs (I'm addicted to reading passages of other peoples' conlangs aloud), Che Conlangua has an appreciation of conlangs. It is for this reason of love and fandom that Che is unhappy to start out this orthography trashbin with a critical analysis of one of conlanging's biggest columns: Teonaht.

Before we begin, a shout out to Arahu: nice use of umlaut for palletal-glides.

To introduce the subject of orthography, I will re-list Che Conlagua's arbitrary rules of conlang orthography:
1. DO NOT use punctuation to represent phonemes other than the glottal plosive.
2. DO TRY to hold to a one letter one phoneme standard.
3. DO NOT make up new letter forms.
4. TRY NOT TO use rare letter forms IF you want to publish your conlang in ASCII.
5. DO NOT use counter-intuitive letter forms and/or digraphs.

Teonaht breaks rule 5.
Although Teonaht is very good on all other counts, it insists on doing something quite counter-intuitive: placing the h before the sound it modifies. Th becomes ht, sh becomes hs. Why? To be different I guess. As well, it breaks its own rules. The fricatives regularly use h except for /j/ representing [Z]. Then in the affricatives, we have /c/ for [tS] but /dj/ for [dZ]. Why not follow the other letters and have /hz/ for [z] and /j/ for [dZ]? Then the orthography goes on to have /w/ for [w] but /u/ for [j], breaking all intuitive rules. Since /y/ is used for a vowel, it's understandable that it couldn't be used for [j], but why not follow a slew of other languages and use /i/? The answer to that is that after Teonaht's disastrous vowel system, /u/ is a leftover letter that can be used for [j]. But Che!!, you say, Che, does Teonaht just not have a [u] sound; why would it have /u/ left over. Well, the answer to that is that:
Teonaht breaks rule 4.
Teonaht has eight vowels. Being three more than the PALTRY selection of the roman alphabet, it is understandable that some improvisations have to be made. But teonaht makes almost all the wrong fixes. Teonaht spells [u] as /õ/, originally a sign in portugese for a nasal [u]. But since Teonaht [u] is not nasalised, and it could bloody well use /u/ for [u], it just leaves me sad and agitated. Teonaht very sensibly distinguishes [I] and [i] with /i/ and /y/ respectively, so props there. But it then decides to use û for the schwa. Why not follow the lead of Welsh (and the lead from other conlangs), and use y for a schwa? One could then SENSIBLY use /î/ for [i], since you could conceivably view it as a long [I]. Using û for [@] schwa is just baffling unles sone remembers that funny little English orthography trick where we can use /u/ for [@]. But since English is the only language that does this, û simply continues to be not only mystifying, but overdone for a schwa. Schwas tend to be lax vowels as opposed to vowels in their own right, and therefore it's nice to use a very small nondescript vowel for them. Adding a circumflex accent or ANY accent onto a vowel makes it stand out, and thus defeats the ninja agenda of the schwa.
I will give Teonaht points for the following things: it has the lateral fricative [K], which I should just marry at this rate, and it distinguishes four (sometimes five) liquids: [l] [r:] [r'] [4] and sometimes [R].

Klingon breaks rule 5.
It gets a pass on rule 1 because it uses the apostrophe for a glottal stop. And yet, and yet, Klingon does the doofiest thing imaginable: capitalization. If you thought it was using capitals to try to follow rule 2, look at its trigraph /tlh/ for by darling [K] when it could have used /L/ or /T/. It also uses /gh/ and /ng/ when it could use /G/ and /N/, so it doesn't even stick with its wonky system. And although /i/ does indeed represent [I], it is not contrastive with /i/ and [i] since [i] does not exist. And since /e/ is [E], why not write it /E/? Le sigh. I know that Klingon was constructed to be alien and unwieldy, but this is just ridicudonkulous.

Lojban is the reason rule 1 exists.
I could aim my hatred of apostrophe abuse at every single highschool fantasy authour who has "a language", but I'll abstain because they just don't know any better. Lojban should. For the language that strives to be logical, it dries me up the wall with illogical orthography. Lojban uses /'/ for [h]. Lojban does not use /h/. Why not use /h/ for [h]? IS IT THAT HARD? I know that /'/ serves a grammatical purpose, but it doesn't serve any less of a purpose if it is spelled /h/. And once you guys decide to spell [h] with an /h/, you can use /'/ for the glottal stop like everyone else instead of using a goddamn FULL STOP (period).

I shouldn't rag on Solresol, but I will. Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si : /D/ /R/ /M/ /F/ /S/ /L/ Si/. Why in the word not better distinguish sol and si? Since Sol and Si both start with s, this makes us write out /S/ and /Si/ when the dang language should just have seven letters. Perhaps using Ti for Si (which would let us use /T/) hadn't been invented yet in France at Solresol's conception, but the language could still use /I/ to stand for Si.

Wenedyk loses because it decided to use the Polish alphabet in its orthography. I have nothing against the Polish language, but fo srs, hooks? Remember the last time conlangs decided to borrow from Polish? Yeah, ESPERANTO. And look how that turned out:

I know that Esperanto is a very divisive thing. Some people love it, some people hate it. I would feel nothing for it if only certain things about it didn't just stick in my craw. For now I'll just extrapolate onto the most obvious craw-sticker: Esperanto orthography. Zamenhof decided to make up letters not found in any widely spoken language. The idea of one letter per phoneme is great. Really really excellent, rule 2. But Esperanto decided to adhere to rule 2 by breaking rule 3.
ĝ (g circumflex) is a letter which is only used in one natural language: Aleut. In aleut, it stands for [G] (reasonably). Esperanto uses it for [dZ] and thus breaks rule 4 and 5. When Zamenhof made Esp[eranto, there were no typewriters ANYWHERE that had a ĝ key.
ĉ (c circumflex) is a completely made up letter not used anywhere. FGSFDS.  It stands for [tS] by the way.
ĥ (h circumflex) is a completely made up letter not used anywhere.  It replaces [x], which is often written /x/, /ch/, /or /kh/.  Even Zamenhof allowed /hh/ as a substitution.  As a matter of fact, Zamenhof often use +h systems for his altered letters, and they work JUST FINE like that as digraphs, so why the hell not just stick to that system fo srs.
Look, I could keep on going, but there's no point.  ESPERANTO IS BROKEN.  There are plenty of people who have proposed good alternatives.  I won't burden the net with another one but fo srs KJADHSAJKGEARAKRU,E. ARGLBLARGL.

SO, in conclusion, Kelen has my hearts.  This was Che Conlangua, complaining a susual in order to revolutionise orthography.  Viva!