Re: Optimum number of symbols

Mike S. wrote:
> I don't quite agree.  First of all, alphabets are not nearly universally
> used.  Secondly, the only people we gave an alphabet were the people
> who did not have any writing at all.  The Japanese, Chinese, etc. all
> still have their indigenous non-alphabetic writing systems.
Well, the Koreans acquired the idea of the alphabet from the West,
replacing their earlier usage of hanzi (completely in the North, mixed
with hanzi in the South, I believe), and the Vietnamese have also
abandoned the old hanzi-based system.  I'm sure there's other examples.

> Furthermore, I doubt it was ever very likely that morphemic systems
> were going to become universally used, and that's not just because
> the Chinese didn't take over the world.
If the Chinese had, I'm sure other societies would've gone the way of
the Japanese and developed a syllabic or perhaps even alphabetic script
alongside the hanzi-based system.  Logographic systems aren't very
useful for inflected languages, but can be great for isolating
languages.

> They developed the vowel because the Greek
> language *needed* it.
Actually, some linguists think it was, in essence, an accident.  They
encountered these Phoenicians letters that they had no use for, and
applied it to what they heard as the sound, so /?alEf/ (or something
like that), which was used for /?/, sounded to them like it just started
with /a/, so they used it for that sound.

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