Re: Optimum number of symbols

"Mike S." wrote:
> Actually, most of the time, these patches are either unphonetic
> or unproductive as phonetic markers.  I'm not sure what to call
> the "h" in English diagraphs, but a phonetic marker
Not a very productive one, no, but it does tend to mark similar sounds.
/s/-/S/, /t/-/T/, not to mention in dialects, /k/-/x/ (c-ch as in
Scottish _loch_), and things like "zh" are often used in "phonetic"
spellings for /Z/

> Likewise, the Spanish tilde only marks one grapheme
> --arguably phonetic but hardly productive.
I was thinking more of Portuguese tilde, which indicates nasalization.

> In short, *very* few modern alphabetic have implemented any
> phonetic markers productively, and *no* alphabet relies heavily
> on phonetic markings in a systematic way.
Hangul does.

> On the other hand, it's trivially easy to design a script that
> systematically encodes the phonemic contents of a syllable
> and call it a syllabic system; my point is that to the extent
> it exploits phonemic markers to its advantage, it's really
> (by definition even!) a phonemic system in disguise, and serves
> as evidence that a *phonemic* system simply makes more sense.
Fine, call it a "phonemic syllabry" then, if you want.  The point is,
it's still primarily a syllabry which incorporates some phonetic traits,
which, I stress, came about NOT thru its initial design, but thru the
origin of those codas.

> Nonsense.  Would you need more characters than Chinese?
> You can create a symbol for every syllable in your language
> if you wanted to.
Well, I *could* but it would be impractical to create a few thousand
characters, plus, a lot of possible syllables aren't used

> But I'll tell you what you can't do.  Upon seeing a new syllabic,
> you can *not* guess what it sounds like.  However, in a alphabetic
> system, upon seeing a new word, you have a fighting chance of
> getting the sound on the basis of the letters you know.
Hunh?  Upon seeing a new letter, I'd have no more idea of how to say it
than I would seeing a new syllabic character.  What on Earth are you
talking about?  Once you learn the letters or syllabic characters, you
can read a new word just as easily.

Incidentally, I've also noticed that alphabets frequently have multiple
pronunciations per character, whereas that's not as common in syllabic
systems.

> The
> analytical nature of the alphabet, which you fault for being
> overly abstract, is the alphabet's greatest feature, because
> once that's mastered, you have a chance to read any word.
Why do you keep thinking I'm criticizing it?  I'm NOT, I'm defending the
syllabry, saying that an alphabet is NOT inherently superior.  It's
better for some languages, yes, but not inherently superior.  There are
advantages and disadvantages to every writing system, even to
logographic systems.  Why do you think we write $5 instead of "five
dollars"?  Because it's more compact.  And, in some contexts, an
alphabet would be simply inefficient.  Imagine trying to do math without
using numerals, for example.

> I wasn't trying to generate a naturalistic script; I was trying
> to generate an efficient, practical one that could compete
> successfully against a phonemic system.
My apologies, clearly we have different goals in our conlanging.

> And actually, it's overly inefficient orthographies that are
> unnaturalistic.
Like English?  :-)  And mine's not "overly inefficient"

> People in all ages and places naturally want
> to save time, and orthographic symbols naturally assume simpler
> forms over the years.
And I have simulated that.  However, I know of no script where frequency
is linked in any systematic way to simplicity.

> However, I would think if you had more
> than a few hundred syllables to encode, it would make sense however
> to start regularing the characters by reference to their phonemic
> components.  That's really nothing more than smooshing together
> alphabetic symbols, regardless of what you call it.
If there were any systematic relationship between, for example, _ka_ and
_ku_, I'd agree, however, there's not.  At most, you could call mine a
mixed alphabet-syllabry.

And another advantage syllabries have is greater conciseness, requiring
less space than alphabets.

--
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