Re: Optimum number of symbols

Wesley Parish wrote:


>Any point in asking if there are any conlangers who have built scripts
>similar to the Indian systems?  Monophonemic syllabary, representing
>[character]  /a/, with subscripted or superscripted marking for the other
>vowels, and including a postscripted letter to indicate /aa/?
>
Barry Garcia's Kuraw, for one-- and a beautiful script it is.  Perhaps he'll
post the URL.

Kash started out as a similar-type script, but it looked rather messy I
thought, and since there are frequent word final C, it required over-use of
the vowel killer symbol; so in the con-history it changed to an alphabetic
script by enlarging the vowel diacritics and writing them as separate
characters.

<http://cinduworld.tripod.com/alphabet.htm>

An interesting problem was caused by the (arbitrary) rule that the vowel
carrier ("V" intrinsic _a_) could only occur initially, not  within a word--
so /kai/ 'live' had to be written _K.Yi_ (not K.Vi),  but _/iu/ 'it; that'
was _Vi.Yu_.  (And still are written "kayi, iyu" even though the "y" is
barely pronounced.)

A word like /karun/ 'duke, lord' was _K.Ru.N\_ and suffixed forms became a
problem, which has never quite been resolved-- /karun-mi/ 'my lord'
_K.Ru.N\.Mi_ or _K.Ru.N.Mi_ (implying incorrect [karunámi]) or morphophon.
_K.Ru.MBi_ (correct [karúmbi]).  There is still debate as to how to write
such words-- very very formal users write "karunmi" but everyone else writes
"karumbi"-- the problem being that in some cases there could be homophones,
e.g. /amar-ni/ 'its/the era' > amandri, which could theoretically be a
nominal form /añ-vandri/ of a base /vandri/.