Re: Optimum number of symbols

And Rosta scripsit:

> Is it correct to say these are not featural -- that the shape of
> a character gives no indication of its value? (I think it's true
> of the Cherokee syllabary, but that never struck me as admirable.)
True non-featural syllabaries are rare.  Besides Cherokee and the Hira
and Kata twins, there is only Yi, which has a small degree of
featurefulness: the glyphs for middle-high-tone syllables (-x in romanization)
are derived from the corresponding glyphs for middle-low-tone syllables
(-zero in romanization) with a curved-circumflex-above diacritic.
The high-tone and low-tone glyphs do not in any way resemble the middle-tone
glyphs, and there is no similarity based on consonants or vowels either.

Unicode ignores this regularity, and assigns all 1214 Yi syllabograms
to distinct characters.  (There are also 50 "Yi radicals" which are
used to classify the 1214 characters for lookup purposes; of course,
unlike Han radicals, they have no semantic implications.)

Historically, the Yi syllabary descended from a Han-style morpho-syllabic
system, but when it was standardized, only one character per syllable+tone
was chosen.  We would see the same result if just 1250+ Han ideographs were
chosen to write Chinese in a purely syllabic fashion: there would be no
rhyme or reason, at the phonemic level, to the characters at all.

All the other "syllabaries" in Unicode at present are in fact abjads,
abugidas, or in the case of Hangul, a featural alphabet with unusual
layout rules.  There may be more non-featural syllabaries hiding in
the scripts that are as yet unencoded.

--
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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