Re: Optimum number of symbols

En réponse à Kendra <kendra@...>:

>
> Woot, awesome. I kind of tripped over the link without a clue. so I
> wasn't
> sure.
>
Well, there are actually no more rules on this list than described in the FAQ
you receive when you subscribe. And even those are not often followed :))) .
It's in my opinion what makes it so special. We get along so well without the
need for a strong police :)) .

> In that case, though, what's all this /Q/ and /a/ business? I can figure
> out
> some of it from context, but would like to know I'm getting them right.
You're talking about the phonemic notation? Well, that's a long story, but to
make it short there is an alphabet called the IPA used to transcribe sounds
accurately. Since it features plenty of characters that ASCII doesn't have,
various transcription systems have been created to be able to write IPA on
media like e-mail. You can find a description of the different ASCII-IPA
transcriptions here: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/ascii-ipa.html. Here the most
commonly used system is X-SAMPA, an extension of SAMPA to include the full IPA
(but some people prefer the Kirshenbaum system). To learn what sounds the IPA
characters refer to, you can go to this page:
http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/.

Now what's with the slashes? Well, there are two levels of representation of
sounds: the phonemic level (which represents the abstract entities that the
speaker of a language differentiate. For instance, the 't' of 'top' is not
pronounced the same as the 't' of 'stop' - the former is pronounced with a puff
of air, we say 'aspirated', that the latter lacks -. Yet English speakers
consider both sounds to be the same entity, and often don't even hear the
difference unless pointed at it. Thus both sounds, though different, are
considered in English to be a single phoneme: a unit of speech recognised by
the speakers as different from all the others the language has), which is
represented by surrounding it with slashes //, and the phonetic level (which
represents the actual sounds that come out of the mouth. In this level, the 't'
of 'top' and the 't' of 'stop' are represented differently, since they are
actually two different sounds) which is represented in brackets []. Finally
there's also the orthography itself, how the word is written. It can be
enclosed in <>, but that may provoke problems with e-mail clients that insist
on transcribing everything in HTML, in {}, in '', but a new convention that
arised here and seems to catch on is to use pipes ||. But unlike the slashes
for the phonemic transcription and the brackets for the phonetic transcription,
there's no strict convention for surrounding the actual written object.

So to sum the whole thing up, the English word written |stop| is
phonemically /stOp/ and phonetically [stOp] (not sure about the vowel, so I use
the one I myself use), while the English word written |top| is
phonemically /tOp/ and phonetically [t_hOp] (_h marks aspiration in X-SAMPA).

If you never saw those things before, my explanation is probably extremely
confusing. Don't worry about it, those things are so much used on the list that
you will get used to it fast. But I do urge you to learn the IPA and at least X-
SAMPA, or you'll never be able to understand what goes between slashes or
brackets, which is important if you want to have an idea of how other people's
conlangs sound like, or if you want to explain us how your conlang(s) sound
like.

> I
> didn't see anything of this on the FAQ that was mailed out a few days
> ago,
> and if it was there and I missed it, my many apologies, I'm somewhat out
> of
> sorts right now (too much random work. baaah!)
>
Indeed it's not on the FAQ. People here are thinking of making a new FAQ which
would include such information, or at least the links I gave you.

> Completely off topic and meaningless, are there any females on this
> list? It
> just struck me that I haven't seen (well, *recognized* one female name
> in my
> mailbox! (Just curious. ;)
>
There are quite a few on this list. I can think of Sally Caves and Irina Rempt
(who are unfortunately not on the list at the moment, for lack of time), Yoon
Ha Lee (whom I've not seen for a while), H. S. Teoh (IIRC female :)) ), Nicole
Perrin (probably lurking somewhere), Nicole Dobrowolski (I hope I didn't
slaughter your name :)) ) and Sylvia Sotomayor (also probably lurking). They
are the ones I can think of on top of my head. I probably forget quite a few of
them, sorry! :((

>
> Heheh, that answers my question. My train of thought is basically that
> it's
> easier to memorize words as a whole than their parts, which then leads
> to
> parts (syllables), which then leads to letters.
It's indeed how we read, even people who use alphabets. We don't read letter by
letter, except uncommon words, but by the general shape of the word.

> Ideograms would be too cumbersome for a language with an expansive
> vocabulary (can you imagine english? Yeesh. I think we have something
> insane
> like 10,000 words? I forget.)
>
Well, Chinese has quite an expansive vocabulary, and yet uses ideograms. But
first ideograms don't correspond to words but to morphemes, so when you have
compounds or bimorphemic words you use two ideograms to write them down, and
even then you arrive at nearly 5000 characters (at least the ones commonly
used) and Chinese people seem to have no problem with it :)) .

> Though to be honest, I really prefer alphabetic writing systems because
> it's
> fun to put completely random letters together and see what happens.
> *another random thought*
> I wonder how acronyms work in languages which use syllabic scripts? Or
> do
> they not at all?
>
In Japanese, where words are polysyllabic and often written with two or three
kanji (ideograms borrowed from China), acronyms are often made by taking only
the first ideogram of each word, making a new, shorter word standing for the
full phrase. I find that personally a very neat way to make acronyms :)) .

> Yes, I am obviously a monoglot. But I'm trying! :)
>
Hehe, carry on!

>
> That's true, but at least you can recognize things written, even if
> you
> pronounce them really strangely. With Japanese (since it's the only
> thing I
> can think of that I'd be remotely familiar with,) I'm lost on both
> counts.
But that comes more from the restrictive phonology of Japanese than from the
syllabary itself. Even written alphabetically, connecting |sakkaa| and |soccer|
is not obvious (it is when you know it, but when you don't know it's not :)) ),
and if you recognize |enajii| to be |energy| at first glance, then you're very
good!

> (And I keep wanting to write "framiliar!" A lot of people around here
> say
> framiliar. I wonder where that came
> from.)
Hyper-rhoticisation? I've heard it was common enough in America.

> French in general is crazy. It seems like it's all vowels to me.
Well, being French, I can tell you it's not :)) . We have nice consonant
clusters too (try "psychologue", remembering that the 'p' is pronounced :)) ).

> Speaking it
> gives me a headache. (But that doesn't stop me!)
>
Please carry on! The headache will disappear quite fast :)) .

> Pointless rant about french: I asked my teacher to give me second-year
> work
> for the summer, and he told me to take a class at a college (I'm a
> highschool student.) However, I doubt my mom wants to take me all the
> way to
> out somewhere, since the community college doesn't offer second-year
> French
> over the summer. Bah! Bah I say!
>
Maybe you should try on Internet. I've seen that there are a few French courses
available. You should be able to find one for your level.

>
> I would tentatively agree. I had no problems learning the roman
> alphabet
> when I was very little (my mother always had an alphabet chart over
> our
> fireplace for some reason!) and casually picking up the japanese
> syllabic
> alphabets was similarly easy 10 years later. Tiri'n (alphabetical) took
> me
> only a day to learn, but I STILL don't use the correct vowels.
>
It took me less than a day to learn both Japanese syllabaries, and I still can
read them correctly (though writing is another story. I recognise the
characters, but can't remember them when needed for writing :)) ). On the other
hand, I still have difficulties with Cyrillic, despite its similarities with
the Greek and Roman alphabets that I know, and I still don't master the Arabic
script (alphabetic, at least for the consonants), even the isolated forms. And
it's not a problem of time spent on it or interest (I spent much more time
learning Arabic and the Arabic script than Japanese in my life, and I find the
Arabic script one of the most beautiful of the world, more than the Japanese
syllabaries :)) ).

> I hope multiple replies like this aren't forbidden or something? I
> don't
> want to spam the list with my short answers...:)
>
You did well. In fact, since there is a 100 mail per day limit on the list,
multiple replies are rather advisable. The only problem may come then from the
title, since many people on the list decide from the title whether they are
gonna read the post or not (I don't do that myself. I read everything and
anything that comes from the list :)) ).

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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