Re: Optimum number of symbols

On Thu, 23 May 2002 09:53:11 +0200, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>En réponse à "Mike S." <mcslason@...>:
>
>>
>> The problem is that the compellingness found in this argument
>> proceeding from the German example does not extend well to
>> English or French; written English's overbearing insistence
>> on morphemics and written French's overbearing insistence on
>> marking inflections long since disappeared from speech, while
>> useful in some ways, are clearly not worth their cost in terms
>> of learnability or ease of usage, or at least I think very few
>> people would argue otherwise.  I personally think both of these
>> systems are atrocious, and this atrociousness stems from their
>> *non*phonemic charcteristics that, on balance, are not
>> enhancements in the least.
>>
>
>Here again someone who doesn't understand the basic logic behind the
presence
>of the so-called "silent" letters of French.
It may surprise you to know, but I mostly had English in mind when
I made that statement.  I *am* sorry for bringing French into it.
I was very impressed by your thorough defense of French orthography
though.



>I think that's the main problem: you're arguing about what would be the
best
>writing system, while in fact we should wonder what is the optimum for a
given
>language. And alphabetic and even featural systems may not be optimal for
all
>languages (how would you make such a system for a language like Mandarin,
which
>cannot even be well analysed in phonemic terms?).
Perhaps you've missed some of the recent posts, but thanks to Nik,
And, Raymond, Thomas and others, I have *refined* my position.
The following represents my current thoughts. (For simplicity,
I am not considering morphemic scripts just for the moment).

I feel that many different systems are viable, but especially if
they encode phoneme-level information--which it seems, many if not
most scripts do.  However, although several systems may work for any
given language, it is clear that only one basic type of system will
work for all of them, and that's the alphabet.  Because no other
system can make this claim, it's reasonable to ask, what is it about
alphabets that makes them special?  The reason that the alphabet
is a *universal* system, I believe, is that the alphabet represents
the distillation of the phonemic principle.

Thus, I do claim that alphabets will work *well* for all languages,
and considering that all languages can, at least in practice, be
analyzed into a phoneme inventory (or something quite similar),
it should be self-evident that alphabets *can* do the job--always.
I do *not* claim, however, that an alphabet will do the *best* job.
IMO, most of the other systems actually represent *elaborations*
of the alphabet, which is the distilled principle.  And since these
other systems give the opportunity to be tailored specifically
to the landscape of a particular language and/or take better
advantage, arguably, of the syllabic level of analysis, it may
well prove in many cases that the alphabet is actually sub-optimal.
But if your life depends on selecting a system that will work
well for language X, I recommend that you choose an alphabet.

Thus, my refined position is that alphabets are the simple,
primitive, rationalized prototype for most of the other systems,
but not necessarily the best one in any particular case.

As far as your claims of Mandarin resisting phonemic analysis,
I must admit that is news to me.  I would be *very* interested to
learn more though.



>> I agree that the details of an optimum writing system will
>> tend to vary among languages, but I do have to question whether
>> we are really compelled to apply automatically this "nothing is
>> superior to anything else" concept everywhere, no matter how
>> difficult or inefficient a system appears to be.
>>
>
>Because in many cases it's simply true that nothing is superior to anything
>else.
My point was only that sometimes it isn't true.  Would you disagree?


>The alphabetic systems have just too many drawbacks to be considered best
>compared to other systems, and the only reason you're minimizing those
>drawbacks is because you are used to alphabetic systems.
If this were true, I would not have modified my position in recent days.



>But as much as you
>find the drawbacks of a non-featural syllabic system so strong that you
>conclude thast alphabetic systems are superior, somebody used to a syllabic
>system may find the drawbacks of alphabetic systems so strong that he will
>conclude that syllabic systems are superior. It's all a question of point
of
>view. And there is nothing like an absolute point of view.
It's not quite like that.  I do have reasons for my positions, not
just sentiment.  If I hear other, better reasons, I will change my view
accordingly, as I already have.  In the meantime, as long as I have
a reasoned argument, I see no reason why I must shy away from my
position out of a superstitious fear of the "absolute point of view".



>The only reason why
>alphabetic systems are used nearly universally nowadays is because the main
>powers of the world, where the technology of communication come from, used
an
>alphabetic system and developed their technology to use an alphabetic
system
>excluding all other possibilities. In short, it's only a historical
accident
>which has nothing to do with an alleged superiority of alphabetic systems.
I don't quite agree.  First of all, alphabets are not nearly universally
used.  Secondly, the only people we gave an alphabet were the people
who did not have any writing at all.  The Japanese, Chinese, etc. all
still have their indigenous non-alphabetic writing systems.

Furthermore, I doubt it was ever very likely that morphemic systems
were going to become universally used, and that's not just because
the Chinese didn't take over the world.  I do happen to have the view
that some systems, just possibly, might tend to work better than
others, on average.



>> It is clear to me that scripts arose through a centuries-long
>> evolutionary process, in which enhancements were gradually added.
>> The development of consonant-only syllabary (if I may call it that)
>> represented a major step in this process;  the Greek innovation
>> to add vowel letters to their alphabet represented another.
>> Both these cases, IMO, marked a definite objective improvement
>> over the older systems.  This is not to do not deny the fact
>> that the older systems were adequate;  I do claim however
>> it is possible to make relative utilitarian judgements
>> in certain areas.
>>
>
>The problem is that you take evolution to be always directed towards the
>better, and that what is added is always 'enhancements'. I'm sorry, but
this
>Darwinian illusion has long been proved wrong. It doesn't work in nature,
and
>it doesn't work in society, and especially not with languages. Evolution
>doesn't always go to the better, especially in human societies, where
>everything is biased towards which society is the strongest and the most
>influencial at a certain place or moment. And tools like writing systems or
>government systems follow this influence, they don't create it.
Evolution goes both ways, but in the field of technology, the
accumulative effect (two steps forward, one step back) goes towards
progress.  Technology builds on itself, and who knows where it will
end.  Writing is a technology.  It was developed by people who had
a need for it.  But it was not easy to develop; it took centuries.
Along the way, there had to be innovations.  The Greek vowel letter
is a good example of that.  IMO, it's an error to imagine that
the Greeks' development of vowel letters had anything to do with
international relations.  They developed the vowel because the Greek
language *needed* it.  And the result was a change in the world
of writing forever, for *all* languages, including the less vowel-
rich ones.  That was an *improvement*--or technological evolution,
or whatever you prefer to call it.

In case this has been unclear, I wish to state that I am in the
process of writing a loglang.  As such, I am approaching language
design more from the engelang, as opposed to artlang, perspective.
In engineering, it is a matter of course to quantify, measure,
and compare things.  Thus, none of what I post is intended to have
any bearing whatsoever on the value of artistic creations represented
by artlangs, where such things as performance and efficiency are
at best, very distant secondary concerns to the primary concerns
of aesthetics and creative exploration.

I enjoyed your post actually, and I hope this clarifies for you
my position on alphabets for you.  Again, I am sorry for speaking
about written French.  In the future I will endeavor to keep
my disparaging remarks limited to my own native tongue.

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