Re: Optimum number of symbols

David G. Durand scripsit:

> 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.
However, the Arabic script is used for a great many non-Semitic languages,
often with great pain.  In Mongolian (which is also an abjad, and is
derived from Arabic or something like it by several steps), the same
glyph shapes can represent final a, e, or n.  There is furthermore
no orthographic difference in any position between o and u, o" and u",
t and d, k and g, or y and j.  Thus urtu 'long' and ordu 'palace'
are written identically.

> 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.
And since reading dominates either learning or writing, in terms of the
amount it is done, this is arguably the correct engineering tradeoff.

> 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.
Well, not really.  If you mean dialects strictly, viz. dialects of
Mandarin, then they are no more divergent than those of French or German.
If you mean other Sinitic languages (Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, Min, etc.)
then speakers of those languages *can* "read out" hanzi texts in their own
languages, but the result is frequently ungrammatical: to learn to write Chinese,
they must learn the written conventions of Mandarin, not merely the symbol-sound
correspondences.  The same is equally true of Chinese people who speak Tai
languages.

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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