Re: Optimum number of symbols

At 6:28 PM -0400 5/22/02, Mike S. wrote:
>The problem is that the compellingness found in this argument
>proceeding from the German example does not extend well to
>English or French; written English's overbearing insistence
>on morphemics and written French's overbearing insistence on
>marking inflections long since disappeared from speech, while
>useful in some ways, are clearly not worth their cost in terms
>of learnability or ease of usage, or at least I think very few
>people would argue otherwise.  I personally think both of these
>systems are atrocious, and this atrociousness stems from their
>*non*phonemic charcteristics that, on balance, are not
>enhancements in the least.
Actually, I think that many people would argue otherwise -- this is a
contributing factor in why these systems have not been reformed. For
an educated speaker of English, the morphemic representations in
English give useful information about the structure of unknown or
infrequently encountered words. Even in English, regular rules can
explain the pronunciation of most words.

The morphemic representation also strikes a compromise in the
representation of English dialects, in which vowel quality is highly
variable. The writing system  provides distinct spellings for
distinctions that are not universally present. This enhances written
communication in English, and acts as a unifying force on the
English-speaking (and writing) community. English dialects vary not
just in phonetic inventory, but phonemic inventory, so even a "pure"
phonemic system would introduce spelling variations.

Finally, I'd like to expose an issue that you haven't discussed,
which is that you probably don't just want a system that is phonemic
(each significant graphical unit represents a phoneme) but one in
which each phoneme has only one written representation.

Because my wife is Greek, I've been learning a phonemic orthography
for Demotic Greek. It has a fairly simple 5-vowel system, that writes
simple vowels in 13 different ways. There are also a number of
variant ways to write consonants, and letter (like Upsilon) that
represent either a consonant, or a vowel, or that modify the
pronunciation of another letter, depending on context.

The phonetics of Demotic are also interesting, in that there are a
lot of rules of palatalization that make the letter->phone
correspondence complex. For a native speaker, presumably, these rules
are relatively transparent.

But back to the main point, I think that English spelling has
contributed to the unity of the language across the world, and
prevented, or at least retarded, the development of a range of
English-derived national (or regional) languages. As an English
speaker, this is in my self-interest.

>The same feature was, apparently,
>  >true of ancient Egyptian: only the consonant phonemes needed indication for
>>a L1 speaker.  But the ancient script contains not only symmbols for single
>>phonemes, but also symbols for two or three consecutive consonant phonemes.
>
>It's true that these scripts, which might be called proto-alphabetic,
>indeed marked consonant phonemes.  As I understand it--I might be
>wrong--most of these languages (unlike Greek) had only a few vowel
>phonemes, and thus could more easily afford not marking them.  I would
>have to think though, that although these scripts were basically
>adequate, problems would occasionally arise in any script with such
>an array of polyphonous symbols.  Everything else being equal, wouldn't
>you have to agree that such a script is improved by marking vowels?
In Semitic languages (like Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) the vowel
inventory is not especially small, most have 5-8 vowel systems if I
recall. However the grammatical function of vowels is relatively
light, and they are generally predictable with little to no ambiguity
in context.

While many Semitic languages have had ways to mark vowels, for
millenia, it's surely significant that people have generally _not_
used those techniques except in areas of notating religious
performance, doing very close textual analysis, and the teaching of
children. The recurrence of this pattern indicates to me that
omission of vowels is, for these languages, an optimal tradeoff
between ambiguity of decoding, and difficulty of writing.


>  >IMO no type of writing is per_se superior to another - it depends on the
>>language and, to some extent, what you're writing.  The Linear B syllabary
>>appears to have been a satisfactory way of recording early Greek for
>>clerical purposes; but few would deny the later alphabet gives less
>>ambiguous representation and is, for Greek, more suited for general &
>>literary contexts.  Nevertheless, it is notable that, altho the alphabet
>>had been adopted by the Greeks as early as the 8th cent BC, it continued to
>>be written in a syllabary in Cyprus as late as the 2nd cent BC.
>>
>>But a language with a simpler phonology than ancient Greek, and with a
>>proponderence of open syllables might well be written more efficiently in a
>>syllabary.
>>
>>At any rate, as this interesting thread continues, I am coming more and
>>more to favor the idea of a syllabary for BrSc  :)
>>
>>Ray.
>
>I agree that the details of an optimum writing system will
>tend to vary among languages, but I do have to question whether
>we are really compelled to apply automatically this "nothing is
>superior to anything else" concept everywhere, no matter how
>difficult or inefficient a system appears to be.
Sure, but.

Another factoid for the mix: subtitles for movies in Chinese and
Japanese are much more complete than those in alphabetic writing
systems, because reading speed for logographic scripts is higher in
terms of words-per-time-unit. The inarguable difficulty of learning
such a system does have some payoff. Further, even more than in the
case of English, the Chinese writing system unifies a set of _very_
divergent dialects, that would are mutually unintelligible at the
phonemic level.

The point is that the criteria for optimality are so divergent,
across cultures and languages, that even objective facts are
susceptible of differing interpretation.

We are also hampered from any true evaluation on these matters
because we can't evaluate writing system types across languages very
easily, because it would be immoral to train children to fluency in a
non-standard writing system _only_. Second-writing system learning is
likely to be very different. And even if we wanted to experiment on
adult learners, development of fluency is difficult and
time-consuming; practically, we're unlikely to be able to perform
these kinds of experiment.

>It is clear to me that scripts arose through a centuries-long
>evolutionary process, in which enhancements were gradually added.
>The development of consonant-only syllabary (if I may call it that)
>represented a major step in this process;  the Greek innovation
>to add vowel letters to their alphabet represented another.
>Both these cases, IMO, marked a definite objective improvement
>over the older systems.  This is not to do not deny the fact
>that the older systems were adequate;  I do claim however
>it is possible to make relative utilitarian judgements
>in certain areas.
In at the case of some semitic languages, the writing of vowels,
while commonly taught in schools, is not used in practice, evidence
that this innovation has not paid off in some communicative
environments.

To really answer these questions would require controlled (and
difficult) experiments that have simply not been performed. Some of
those experiments, are IMHO immoral to perform, just as it would be
immoral to raise a child in an L1 environment designed to test the
reality of linguistic universals of various sorts.

   -- David

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