Re: Optimum number of symbols

"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:/

> The basic and universal utility of the phonemic principle has been
> in effect--indeed proven IMO--at least since the development of the
> Greek alphabet with vowel letters, even if the Romans and Greeks did
> not have the same precise modern understanding of "phoneme" we have.
>
> >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).
>
> In the previous paragraphs, you seem to be arguing one of two
> things here, and I'm afraid I don't know which. Here are the two
> possible arguments I have in mind, with my response to both.
>
> (1) Written English and French are basically phonemic, but contain
> nonphonemic characteristics whose complexity present great
> difficulties in both learning and usage; therefore phonemic
> systems aren't all they're cracked up to be.
>
> This does not strike me as a sound argument.  If the scholars
> (or literate population as a whole) responsible for creating the
> orthography for one reason or another (morphemics as in English
> or marking syntax as in French) choose to introduce *non*phonemic
> irregularities into the written language, and consequently these
> irregularities end up causing more trouble than their worth,
> in what way does this indict the phonemic idea?  If anything,
> this seems to be an argument *in favor* of a stricter phonemic
> implementation.
>
> (2) Written English and French are basically phonemic, but contain
> nonphonemic characteristics which enhance the written language;
> A stricter phonemic implementation would remove these benefits;
> therefore pure phonemic systems are not necessarily ideal.
>
> This was the basic tack of Thomas Wier in his thoughtful post
> on the German final stops, where he pointed out that a stricter
> phonemic interpretation would end up being less useful to the
> language's speakers.  This argument to me was valid, and although
> I pointed out that it could be argued that phonemics could be
> insisted upon anyway, I conceded that given the regularity
> if not elegance of the current German orthographic convention,
> I could see the benefit of occasionally compromising the
> phonemic principle to accommodate the morphemic principle.
>
> 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.
>
> Again, I am not sure what you are arguing.  The argument of (1)
> is simply illogical;  the argument of (2) is logical but can not
> be said to apply to either French or English as they are currently
> implemented.
>
> >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.
>
> It's true that these scripts, which might be called proto-alphabetic,
> indeed marked consonant phonemes.  As I understand it--I might be
> wrong--most of these languages (unlike Greek) had only a few vowel
> phonemes, and thus could more easily afford not marking them.
It was more that the vowels could be predicted from common patterns.
Vowels are less important.

> 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.
I'm not "automatically applying" it.  I do believe there are different
advantages to different systems, but not to all systems.  Let me
summarize my views:

Arabic-style with vowel marks
Advantages:
  Useful for Semitic languages, where consonant groups are of the utmost
    importance, relationship between various forms easier to see than
    with a "true" alphabet
Disadvantages:
  ?  (I actually can't see any disadvantages to a *fully vowel-marked*
    Arabic-style alphabet)

"True" Alphabet
Advantages:
  Paucity of characters, presumed ease of learning
  Flexibility
  Easier to make abstract descriptions of a language when one must deal
    with single phones
Disadvantages:
  Lack of conciseness, requiring more characters than any other system
    per word
  Highly abstract
  Frequently multiple pronunciations per character; not sure if this is
    a valid criticism, as I know in detail of only one syllabry, kana,
    in which each character has only one phonemic pronunciation
    (considering the forms with diacritics to be distinct characters)

Syllabry
Advantages:
  Small number of characters, much easier to learn than logograms
  Arguably easier to learn than alphabets
  More concise than alphabets, fewer characters required per word
Disadvantages
  More characters than alphabets
  Less flexible
  Less useful for languages with complex syllables

Logographs
Advantages:
  Much more concise, one character per morpheme (generally speaking)
  Better recognition, easier to recognize a single character than a
    clump of characters
  Better interlinguistic recognition, in cases of a system used in
    different languages (e.g., "dialects" of Chinese)
  Ease of distinguishing homophones
Disadvantages
  Huge number of characters, very difficult to learn
  Phonetic and semantic clues of varying degrees of usefulness when
    faced with a new character (especially when adapted to an unrelated
    language)
  Low degree of flexibility, a new character must be created for a new
    word
  Difficulty of indicating inflections makes it hard to adapt to
    non-isolating languages without mixing in phonetic elements (as
    with Japanese's mixing of kanji and kana)

I tend to think that in most cases, a mixing of systems is best.
English benefits greatly from the use of logographs like 2, $, ¢, ©, +,
=, &, @, #, %, etc.  Mathematicians use what amounts to a logographic
system regularly.  Syllabic elements can be useful too, in those
languages that are suited to it.  Conciseness and (presumably) reading
speed could be improved in an alphabetic system by incorporating
syllabic or polyphonic (like, say, consonant clusters) elements, just as
flexibility can be added to a syllabry by incorporating alphabetic
elements.  The balance of parts depends on the language and, in part, on
subjective decisions.  Would it be advantageous to have a character that
means "the", just as we have one that means "and"?  It could make
writing a bit more concise, but would also create a new character to
learn.

> It is clear to me that scripts arose through a centuries-long
> evolutionary process, in which enhancements were gradually added.
Yet, you yourself admit that English is less efficient.  Just because
something is the result of evolution doesn't mean it's better, it might
just be an historical accident.  And, also, the alphabet didn't evolve
from a syllabry, but rather from a logographic script that came to be
used to show partial phonetic info (specifically, only consonants), was
simplified to show only single phones (still just consonants) and then
came to be fleshed out by adding vowels.

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