Re: Optimum number of symbols

It's been very interesting reading replies so far.  I get the impression
that noone (so far at least) puts much store on Y.R. Chao's 170 to 200
optimum number of symbols.  One way or another, people seem to that as Nik
does:
At 4:39 pm -0400 19/5/02, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>> 1. What is the optimum number of symbols?
>
>I'd say it would depend on the language.
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A few other observations:

At 8:18 pm +0100 19/5/02, And Rosta wrote:
>Ray:
>> So:
>> 1. What is the optimum number of symbols?
>> 2. If the optimum number is in the hundreds (or thousands!), what would
>> each symbol represent?
>
>I don't really know what criteria to ascertain an answer to (1)
Nor do I, which is why I ask.  I still do not really understand what Yuen
Ren Chao had in mind, and wondered if anyone on the list understood better
what he was getting at.  So far, in fact, no one has commented either on
the reasoning he gives nor what he may have had in mind.
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At 3:25 pm -0400 19/5/02, Mike S. wrote:
[snip]
>I think that the first question should proceed from the second
>rather than vice-versa.  In other words, what the symbols optimally
>represent will dictate their numbers.
Yet Y.R. Chao is clearly puts the first question first.  In the two
different passage I quoted he is concerned with the size of the set of
symbols, not with what the symbols represent; tho in the second passage he
does refer, without further explanation, to monosyllables.

>The first choice is whether you want the symbols to represent
>sound or idea.
I want the symbols to represent _language_ which, of course, communicates
ideas but does so, normally, via sound.  All the system I know of that are
termed "writing" have some sound element in them, however pictorial they
may be.

>Representing ideas with symbols turns out to
>be the more natural approach for humans:
Does it?  Then why wasn't it adopted?  All the attested writing system from
way back in the late 4th millennium BC onwards have mapped to language, the
earliest being sumerian which is logographic (as traditional Chinese still
is). i.e. each symbol represent an actual word or morpheme.

The idea that languages like Chinese map to ideas or concepts rather than
words or morphemes was rife in the 17th century and the script was termed
'ideographic' and its symbols 'ideograms'.  They were also convinced that
the then undeciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics were ideograms; but
Champollion's decipherment put paid to that nonsense.

However, Chinese myth persisted well into the 20th century; one finds it
perpetuated, e.g. by the inventor of Speedwords.

>..........symbols, being visual
>units, much more readily conjure up a mental image than suggest
>a sound.
Which is fine if you stick with symbols which correspond to objects that
can be pictured - but is a tad restrictive when one starts getting into
abstract thought.  I'm pretty certain humans were into abstract thinking
millennia before writing appeared.

>In is no accident that the first writing systems were
>essentially series of little drawings.  The innovation to use
>symbols to represent sound is a highly abstract idea that was
>actually quite an important advancement in the history of humans,
>and we often neglect to realize that it took centuries for these
>systems fully to develop.
Well, yes, I guess it did during the long centuries of the neolithic (or do
rock paintings begin as early as the palaeolithic?).  But the earliest
writing systems, i.e. in Sumeria & Egypt, are already well on their way to
representing sound as well as ideas; this is especially true of the
Egyptian system.

>But of course they did develop.  The problem with having symbols
>represent ideas, aside from the daunting size of the symbol set,
>is that in all languages to date, words do not display a one-to-one
>correspondence with ideas, primitive or otherwise,
I know - darned awkward things are languages.  If only we could communicate
with pure thought!  But can we think without language?  I don't think it's
any accident that even the earliest writing systems mapped, as far as we
can tell, onto spoken language.

>and thus using
>a true idea-based writing system to represent actual linguistic
>constructions is extremely problematic. Any such system will be
>riddled with complexity and irregularity, in addition to its
>daunting size.  It remains to be proven whether a constructed
>language could be designed to overcome these shortcomings. However,
>if one *could*, it might turn out to be most elegant--
Wasn't this very thing attempted by some of IAL enthusiasts of the 17th
century?

>imagine,
>going full circle back to ideograms, and using writing to directly
>represent pure thought, while at the same, not forsaking a direct
>correspondence to linguistic expression.  Pleasant to contemplate
>indeed, but not necessarily feasible.
Don't the Bliss symbols attempt to do something like this?  But IMHO
unfeasible if only that we do not fully understand the process of thought.

>This seems to make a sound-based system inevitable.  In this case,
>there are three options for symbols:  morpheme/word level
>representation, syllabic representation, or phoneme representation.
A tad over-simplified, I feel.  It's difficult to describe all aphabetic
systems as 'phoneme representation'.  Only the C and V alphabetic systems,
e.g. Greek, Cyrrillic, Roman may be phonemic, and often aren't (English use
of Roman, e.g).

The Semitic alphabets typically represent only the consonants, the vowels
not being specified (except by later diacritics in some).  Indeed it has
been argued that such scripts are really syllabaries, where each symbol
represents Consonant+vowel, the vowel being unspecified and might even be a
"zero vowel".  Personally, I think that's stretching the meaning of
syllabary somewhat.  I guess the Semitic models can be described as
'phonemic' in that in theory each phonemic consonant has a symbol; but not
all phonemes are represented.
(It may be argued that the phonology of these languages is not best
described in terms of phonemes - but that's another story).

Perhaps even more marginal are the Indian alphabets where each consonant
symbol carries an inherent /a/.

To complicate the issue, ancient Egyptian had whole batteries of symbols
which represented (a) one consonant phoneme, (b) a pair of adjacent
consonant phonemes, and (c) three adjacent consonant phonemes (like their
Semite neighbors, they didn't bother with vowel representation.

>Morpheme/word representation is a practical improvement over
>idea-based graphemes, but shares the same problem of daunting size.
It certainly has the problem of size.  There are said to be more than 10
000 Chinese logograms, but fortunately most are not in everyday usage; but
even for that, one needs to know several thousand.

[snip]
>
>Thus, in most cases, I would have to say the phonemic system is
>probably optimum;
By which, I asume, you mean (as other conlangers appear to do also), 1
phoneme = 1 grapheme.  But, as I've shown above, system are known where a
single grapheme can map to a set of two or three phonemes.

[snip]
>structures, I think the simplicity and efficiency of the phonemic
>system easily trumps all contenders.
English???

>If you are inclined to
>think this is mere bias, consider this: many conlangers have
>designed their own alphabets, but how many have designed syllabic
>sets?
Yes, but that proves little.  It might be (and, to be frank, I strongly
suspect is) because that is simple the writing system most conlangers are
familiar with.

If anyone *has* designed a complete syllabic system,
>I'll bet my hat that it implements markers or some similar
>regular device to correspond directly to final nasal, vowel
>length, or some other phoneme-level distinction.  Possibly
>without knowing it, they are, in fact, conceding the superior
>efficiency of the phonemic system.
I wonder - maybe we'll here from some who have invented syllabaries :)

[snip]
>
>I never went beyond the Roman alphabet, except that I have
>looked at the cyrillic out of curiosity to see how my creations
>would fare there.
I was creating my own writing systems as early as 10. Can't remember what
the earliest was like, alas.
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At 8:23 pm -0400 19/5/02, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Jesse Bangs wrote:
>> Furthermore, any syllabary will fall apart as the
>> language changes, as the syllabary will be unable to handle new
>> syllables.
>
>Not entirely true, you can adapt the syllabry to handle new syllables.
Of course you can - new symbols can be created or adapted from older ones
just as easily as with an alphabetc system.

[snip]
>(and if the changes are too severe, will probably become more of a
>syllabic alphabet), but as English shows, alphabets are hardly immune to
>that problem either.
AMEN!
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At 8:47 pm -0400 19/5/02, Nik Taylor wrote:
>"Mike S." wrote:
>> You fail to mention that syllabic script characters will need
>> be more complex as well.
Why?  The symbols in the Cherokee syllabary are no more complex than the
average alphabetc system (hardly surprising as Sequoya took Roman symbols
as his model).

>>On average, you are probably making
>> close to the same number of strokes per syllable.
>
>In my case, there are fewer strokes on average, as many characters are
>single-stroke, especially in certain variants.
Yes, I would've thought that in a language with simple syllabic structure
you get devise symbols that would certainly need fewer strokes that if you
had a symbol for each phoneme.
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At 1:47 am +0200 20/5/02, taliesin the storyteller wrote:
[snip]
>
>> Ray (in questioning mode)
>
>Good questions they were!

Thanks  :)

>
>t., geez, monday: *another* day when *everything* is closed. Silly Pentecost
Not in the UK; Monday as per usual - Pentecost has not been marked by a
public holiday since sometime in the early 1060s   :=(
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At 8:28 pm +0100 19/5/02, And Rosta wrote:
[snip]
>On another point, I would in a conlang want to reject a phonemic script
>because I reject the very notion of the phoneme.
>
   :)))

I wouldn't go quite that far. But 'phoneme' is only an abstraction which
can provide a convenient tool in certain circumstances; but it's by no
means the only way to describe sound or phonology.
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Alphabets and syllabaries are a bit commonplace.  Has anyone constructed
their own logophonetic script, like Akkadian cuneiform or ancient Egyptian?
Or, indeed, do anything even more exotic ?  :)

Ray.



=======================================================
Speech is _poiesis_ and human linguistic articulation
is centrally creative.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
=======================================================

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