Re: Optimum number of symbols

Quoting "Mike S." <mcslason@...>:

> Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:
>
> >"Mike S." wrote:
> >> IMO, written
> >> ancient Greek and Latin both fall solidly into the category of
> >> phonemic scripts, the occasional quirk or irregularity notwithstanding.
> >
> >There were several contrasts not captured by the script.  For example,
> >the Romans rarely marked long and short vowels, even tho it had the
> >possibility, and Greek had no way of indicating certain vowel contrasts
> >like (IIRC) /a/ and /a:/
>
> That was the one biggie.  In Latin, semivowels and <Q> if you want
> to get picky.  Other than that, highly phonemic.
Well, not really though.  One must remember that what we call "Latin"
(the language as recorded by Caesar and Cicero) was a highly artificial
language at the time that Cicero was giving orations in the Roman Senate.
So much so, in fact, that some who have studied the sociolinguistic
situation of Late Republican Rome and Vulgar Latin believe that Cicero
and Caesar must have been effectively diglossic:  learn one dialect
for public uses, and another, very divergent, perhaps not entirely
intelligible variety for private.  As such, it is an open question
whether one can say "Latin" orthography was really phonemic at all, in
as much as most of the people who spoke some variety of it spoke not
Classical but rather Vulgar Latin.

(I wonder if it's really true that the Emperor Claudius felt there
a need to reform the orthography by the addition of new letters --
Ray, you know?)

> I tend to think [logograms] might be the optimal system for reading
> speed and comprehension.  Everything else about it strikes me as a
> nightmare.
On the other hand, having a unified script served very useful
political ends in unifying the Chinese empire.  It's not an
accident that reform of the writing system came up often when
a new dynasty rose to power.

> The folks who standardized English orthography a few centuries
> apparently were more concerned with pretending they were in ancient
> Rome and Greece and Norman France than making English more efficient.
But a few centuries ago, Ancient Greece and Rome  were in a
very real sense much more a daily part of life for that (small)
part of the population that was literate. Latin was still in
fairly wide use across Europe as a language of science (Newton's
_Principia Mathematica_ came out in English only many years
after its Latin edition) and religion (the language of the Roman
Catholic mass) and international discourse (treaties only
started to be written in English or French in the 18th century).
To be considered educated, at that time one also simply had to
know Greek, to be knowledgable about religious texts
(like the New Testament and the Church Fathers) and not just
read, but also compose, in both Classical and Koine.  It's
often forgotten that it was only in the 20th century when the
number of nonreligious publications in the English language
exceeded the number of religious publications.

So, at the time when Dr. Johnson was working on his dictionary,
there was good reason to pay attention to the Greek and Latin
origins of that vast number of English words from those two
languages, either directly or via French.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier          "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers