Re: Optimum number of symbols

At 8:21 pm -0700 20/5/02, Jim Grossmann wrote:
>Hello, everybody.
>
>Yuen Ren Chao's quote has always fascinated me.
That's why I quoted him.  He never elaborated AFAIK on how the approx. 200
symbols would be implemented.

>Maybe we are alphabet chauvinists.
I've sort of got that impression.

>I *believe* he also made some remarks to the effect that
>morpheme characters make words easier to pick out of a page than sound
>characters, but don't quote me on this.
Yes, he does. I quote:
"As we have noted, reading is not by letters or by words but by much larger
units.  From this point of view, a morphemic or a word-sign system of
writing can be taken in faster than a system based on smaller units.  One
does to be sure take in English by words and sentences in one glance too,
but since there is less individuality in the shape of letters, the words do
not stand out as prominently as in a text of Chinese characters.  In
looking for something in a page of English you have to look for _it_, but
in doing the same on a page of characters the thing looked for, if it is on
the page, will stare _you_ in the face."

>Let's not forget mixed systems:
Indeed not.

[snip]
>
>Come to think of it, such a "mixed" script could even include some
>"determinatives,"
Yep.

>a term I found in a delightful little book called
>"Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Everyone" by Joseph and Lenore Scott.   The
>determinatives convey semantic information that helps differentiate
>homophones in writing.  Also, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, these characters
>served to indicate the termination of a word, just as spaces separate words
>in our modern roman writing.
Co-incidentally, I've been looking more closely at Egyptian hieroglyphic
system also over the past few weeks  :)

[snip]
>create anything half as beautiful as Chinese characters or Egyptian
>hieroglyphs.  However, when it comes to esthetics, the cuneiform scripts
>give me hope.
Yes, I've always entertained the idea at the back of my mind of using some
sort of cuneiform script at sometime. Cuneiform scripts were around for
well over three thousand years and were used for a variety of systems, so
there must've been something going for them.

But to return to R.Y. Chao.  I'd like to give just one more quote:
"No writing system commonly in use records all the elements of speech.
Most systems, for example, record very poorly if at all the prosodic
elements of speech - intonation, stress and pause, sometimes even when
these elements are phonemic, such as stress in English, or in Russian
orthography, in which it is never indicated except in texts for teaching
the language".

And says of phonemic-based writing systems:"But ..... the writing systems
that result are practical but kludgey."  Indeed, I would not disagree with
this; but I don't think the shortcoming is confined to phonemic-based
systems - it afflicts all writing systems.  But then, writing was never
intended to represent all the features of the living, spoken language, but
rather to be a convenient way of recoding language in such a way that it
gives enough info for a competent speaker of the language to restore the
original - therefore,for the most part 'practical but kludgey'.

Ray.






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