Re: Optimum number of symbols

At 10:02 pm -0400 25/5/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond Brown scripsit:
>
>> I suppose it is 'trivially easy' to sit down for a quarter of an hour or so
>> and come up with an alphabeticization for Mandarin Chinese (I've done so
>> many times  :)
>> But it is not, I submit, a trivial task to come up with a satisfactory form
>> of Romanization.  There have been so far four centuries of attempts.
>
>But I don't think the difficulties of Romanization particularly reflect
>the difficulties of alphabeticization.  The former arise because Latin
>script has been around for millennia and has built up a substantial
>tradition of its own.
This is certainly truth in that, or rather that the Latin script has
developed traditions of its own. One has only the think of the way that
some broadcasters mangle Pinyin to realize the ambiguities inherent in
Romanizing any hitherto un-Romanized language which does not have a fairly
simple phonology.

I believe there were attempts to alphabetize Mandarin using Cyrillic
characters and that doesn't appear to have had any more success.  I still
think that if one is going to try and alphabetize Mandarin _phonemically_
(and that was what was being discussed) it is not a trivial matter.  I'm
not saying it cannot be done, merely that it is not quite straightforward
because, as I have pointed out elsewhere, there are problems in deciding
what are the phonemes (if one holds to that theory) of Modern Standard
Chinese.

>> 1918 saw the publication of the Zhu4yin1 Zi4mu3 (Pronunciation Alphabet) in
>> which the symbols were adapted from forms of simple characters;this was
>> introduced into schools in 1920.
>
>And this scheme was put together in a few years and has endured up to
>this day, being used in elementary writing in Taiwan still, and being
>acceptable (as no other orthography is, whether hanzi or Latin)
>to all the different Chinese-speaking nations.  Alphabetizing Chinese
>was in fact very straightforward, being based on an analysis of
>Chinese syllables into initials and rhymes that dates back to
>the Tang Dynasty.
Now that is a very different matter.  Yes, I know this method of
phonetizing Chinese writing does have a long tradition.  But Zhu4yin1
Zi4mu3 is not an alphabet if by that one means a near phonemic script.
But....

At 10:51 pm -0400 25/5/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Nik Taylor scripsit:
>
>> Was this an alphabet or a syllabry, or something in between?
>
>Definitely an alphabet.   Each of the 21 initial consonants of
>Mandarin (b p m f d t n l g k h j q x zh sh ch r z c s) has a distinct
>letter.
Certainly there is no disputing these are alphabetic.

>The final letters are a bit more complex, e.g.
>Pinyin "wu" is represented by "u" alone, the finals "an", "en",
>"ang", "eng" are represented by single letters (which can be
>compounded with "u" "i" "yu"), the letter "er" represents the
>stand-alone syllable "er" or the postfinal retroflexion "-r", etc.
Yes the rhymes are more complex.  Those with vowel + final consonant sounds
have the same format as the VC syllabics of Akkadian writing.

If by 'alphabet' one means a quasi-phonemic script, the symbols for rhymes
don't really conform.  Maybe, just as the terms abjad and abugida have been
coined to denote particular varieties of what was once called 'alphabet',
the term 'bopomofo' shouldn't be coined for an alphabet which has separate
characters for each initial and each rhyme.

ObConlang - I once made draft outlines of a language which would be better
with a bopomofo, but never got beyond the drawing board with it.  Maybe
that's another project for when I retire   ;)

Ray.



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