Re: Logophonetics (was: Optimum number of symbols)

At 4:16 pm -0400 20/5/02, Steg Belsky wrote:
>On Mon, 20 May 2002 19:58:10 +0100 Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
>writes:
>> Alphabets and syllabaries are a bit commonplace.  Has anyone
>> constructed
>> their own logophonetic script, like Akkadian cuneiform or ancient
>> Egyptian?
>> Or, indeed, do anything even more exotic ?  :)
>>
>> Ray.
>-
>
>I might have, if i'm understanding you correctly.
No, the system you described would've have developed possibly into a
logographic system like Chinese.

>Back in elementary school my brother and i were into codes.
[snip]
>One of the codes i made was originally a list of ideographs for such
>'important' concepts as:
>fire, earth, air/wind, water, void, day, night, human, domesticated
>animal, reptile, fish, whale, day, night, sun, moon, star(s), big dipper,
>tree, grass, weeping willow tree...
>
>A bit later, i took the ideographs and mapped each of them to a letter of
>the Latin alphabet (as used by English),
In the logophonetic systems I referred to above, some symbols were used to
denote whole words or morphemes, like your system above.  But there were a
whole lot more symbols (indeed, the mainly used symbols) that denoted
_sounds_ only.  In the Akkadian script these were syllables, with symbols
for both CV and VC syllables; in Egyptian, which as I've said elswhere
ignored vowels (just as the Semitic scripts normally do also), there were
symbols for single consonants, two and three adjacnt consonants.  Both
systems also used 'determinatives', i.e. symbols that gave a 'general clue'
to the meaning of the word as a further aid in addition to the phonetic
components.

Ray.



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Speech is _poiesis_ and human linguistic articulation
is centrally creative.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
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