Re: Optimum number of symbols

En réponse à "Mike S." <mcslason@...>:

>
> It's only problematic I think if you consider it very important
> to encode morphemic information in addition to, and on top of,
> the phonemic information.  If morphemic coding starts getting
> too complex, I feel it's always a viable option to back off
> and go totally phonemic.  If different morphemes are not
> distinguished in the speech, or if the same morpheme
> alternates, why should we fret so much when the same thing
> occurs in writing?
>
Because speech offers more clues for disambiguating than writing. During a
communication, more than 50% of the message is actually transmitted non-
verbally. Tone, prosody, facial features and body language account for a
disambiguating context that writing cannot offer. Hence the need to
disambiguate in writing what is not disambiguated in speech. The only
disambiguating context writing can offer is the previous sentences written
before, and it's far from equating the context present in speech. In short,
actual speech can afford more ambiguities than writing, since it has more ways
to disambiguate (it's well-known that a single word can be a fully unambiguous
declaration in speech, while the same word, even accompanied by punctuation,
will never give a fully unambiguous message in writing, since this word is not
accompanied by the prosody, tone and posture of the speaker at the moment, and
often also lacks the spatial and temporal context when it was uttered).

In short, writing needs to disambiguate more than speech, which is why purely
phonemic systems are not only less advantageous but also not advisable. And I
think it's something people know nearly instinctively. After all, why didn't
the Japanese throw away all the kanji while their kana are far enough to write
everything they want to write? Simply because the burden of ideograms is
compensated by the possibility of disambiguating homophonous words which are
easy to disambiguate in speech thanks to things like prosody, body language and
context, but not in phonemic writing where all those things are absent and the
context of the previous sentences may be far from enough. Add to that a much
faster reading and writing, and suddenly the use of ideograms because more
optimal than a purely phonemic system.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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