Re: Optimum number of symbols

At 10:44 pm -0500 21/5/02, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
[snip]
>
>Actually, I was referring to different forms:  <Rad> and <Rat>
>are homophonous in the singular, and yet are phonologically
>distinct in the plural:  <Räder> /RE:d@/ and <Räter> /RE:t@/.
>This does bear on the criticism of a true phonemic system, since
>a true phonemic system will fail to capture phonological
>neutralizations like that in the German data I presented.
>That is, /Rat/ is really two distinct words: /Rat/-1 and /Rat/-2,
Surely, phonemically they are /ra:d/ and /ra:t/ respectively, tho both
pronounced [ra:t], since in syllable final position /d/ is pronounce [t].
But the falling together of final /t/ and /d/ is one of those awkward
features that in my view suggests the phonemic analysis does not tell us
the whole story.
-----------------------------------------------------

At 11:27 pm -0400 21/5/02, Mike S. wrote:
>On Tue, 21 May 2002 21:08:46 -0500, Thomas R. Wier
[snip]
>> I think it is fair to
>>say that English orthography is, in many respects, just a
>>more exaggerated version of that kind of morphophonological
>>alternation.
>
>Indeed it is.  Excruciatingly so.  It was for this reason
>that I argued that it was knocking down a strawman to cite
>English in order criticize phonemic systems.
Is it?  No one has mentioned French orthography - another strawman?

My daughter-in-law who is as French as they come, being born & brought up
right in the heart of the Hexagone, claims that French spelling is much
more difficult than English.  At least in English, when we write a
grammatical ending on a word, we pronounce the thing (even if we have to
learn that -ed is usually just [t] or [d] and not [Id]).  What are we to
make of a system where kids have to learn the correct spelling of various
grammatical endings which are normally silent, and have to spend time
learning the different spellings of homophonous endings?  Has no one except
me ever received letter from a French national with spellings like
"j'était"?  J'en doute.

I contend the neither French nor English are strawmen.  The simple truth of
the matter is that alphabetic scripts have never been phonemic until the
creation of some last century.  Where alphabets were developed and evolved
over centuries we have admittedly a 'tendency towards phonemic spelling'.
Indeed, it can be argued that it was this tendency that helped develop the
phonemic theory, which in turn influenced the development of alphabets for
languages which had not written before.

In English and French, the correspondence between alphabet and phoneme is
less close than it is in, say, Welsh or Spanish or, indeed, ancient Greek
or Latin (neither of which were written totally phonemically).

Also, as I've pointed out before, other scripts besides alphabets can and
do/did represent phonemes (assuming, for the sake of argument, that
phonemes are valid entities).  In the Semitic languages, when the consonant
phonemes are known an L1 speaker can generally infer the correct vocalic
phonemes from context; therefore, traditionally Semitic alphabets have
represented only consonant phonemes.  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.

All written systems, except purely logographic systems such as traditional
Chinese and ancient Sumerian, either contain large phonetic element (e.g.
Akkadian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, modern Japanese) or are, in
theory, entirely phonetic (i.e. syllabaries and alphabets).

But as R.Y. Chao (an L1 Chinese speaker) wrote:
"It is making a false dichotomy to say that Chinese writing represents
meaning and that syllabic and alphabetc writing represents sound.  The
written symbol  |
               / \_  [ach - best I can do with ASCII!]
              /
represents as much the spoken word _jén_ [Pinyin _ren4_] as the meaning
'man'; the written form _man_ represents as much the meaning 'human being'
as the sound [m{n]."

All written systems, in fact, are ways of recording the real language (i.e.
what people actually _speak_) in such a way that someone who knows &
understands the representation used can reconstitute the original.
Unfortunately, of course, in some ancient scripts reconstitution of the
original can be done only imperfectly (ancient Egyptian) or not at all
(Linear A [at present]); but that is rather like the position where digital
material was archieved, say, 40 years back and no (proper) record of the
system used was kept or it has been lost.

The fact that we can, e.g. 'read' ancient Egyptian in that we understand
what the words mean and how they fit together, without knowing their proper
pronunciation, can lead us to suppose that written language is primarily
concerned with meaning.  But this IMO is false.  There are counter-examples
where the script is known and, therefore, the language can be 'read' in the
sense that one can approximate the ancient pronunciation, but the meaning
of what is written is unknown.  The surviving Eteocretan inscription on
Crete are obvious examples: written in the Greek alphabet, but the language
is entirely lost.

Also, even if ancient Egyptian, say, had been written in a fully 100%
phonemic system - vowels as well as consonants - we'd still not know
exectly how it was pronounced unless some astute phonologist from ancient
times had given us a detailed description of the different phonetic
realizations of the phonemes in different environments.  All we would have
is a more accurate _approximation_ than the one we have now.  But as,
without time travel, we'll never have occasion to lisyen to or chat with an
ancient Egyptian, one approximation holds little advantage over another.

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.






=======================================================
Speech is _poiesis_ and human linguistic articulation
is centrally creative.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
=======================================================

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