Re: Optimum number of symbols

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. Actually, more than 95% of the
French orthography can be justified in terms not only of morphemic value but of
*phonemic* value! Have you ever heard of the phenomenon of liaison which is so
important to spoken French? (incorrect liaisons are extremely bad practice,
they can even create misunderstandings) Those "inflections long since
disappeared from speech" have the nasty habit to reappear strongly in cases of
liaison (that's to say when the word is followed by a word beginning with a
vowel) in non-obvious ways, which would make writing a nightmare if you had to
have a phonemic system (how would you write with a phonemic system a word
like "grand": tall, which can appear in masculine singular as [gRa~], [gRa~t]
or [gRa~d], in masculine plural as [gRa~nz], in feminine singular as [gRa~d]
and in feminine plural as [gRa~d], [gRa~d@] or [gRa~dz] without making it a
nightmare for the learner, especially since he wouldn't have many other words
that work the same way, and that the rules for the appearance of each form are
nothing simple?). The system of 'silent' letters may be imperfect, but it has
major advantages:
- it unifies somehow the different forms according to their functions (making
it easier to recognise a plural, a feminine, a conjugated form, even if it
appears in a context where the ending won't actually be pronounced),
- it hints at the presence of a possible liaison and at its pronunciation (in
an imperfect way, but liaison is too complicated a phenomenon to hope to render
it accurately with the tools provided by us with the alphabet),
- it makes a same form written always the same way in all environments, which
is a big help for the reader and the learner. Along with the first advantage,
it allows to learn only a few rules and forms which can then be used with
nearly all words of the same category, the exceptions being usually
recognisable by their orthography. Beleive me, a purely phonemic orthography
for French would be impractical and unlearnable. One would not even be able to
put word boundaries!
99% of all the silent letters used in French are justifiable that way. The only
quirks of the French orthography that cannot be justified like that are:
- the strange use of -x instead of -s for some plurals. It's the only thing
that I cannot justify at all. The only reason for that dichotomy is historical.
A good orthographic reform could replace all -x by -s in the plural without
creating any problem. The result would be in my opinion less aesthetic (I have
a soft spot towards |x| :)) ) and the gain minimal, but there would be no loss
in the change.
- the use of -e after |é| in some feminine words. I'm not talking about past
participles, since the presence of -e to oppose feminine and masculine forms,
though unnecessary for pronunciation, helps keeping all the participles in the
same group, having the same inflections. Changing that would suddenly create
two kinds of participles, some needing a -e for the feminine and some not,
which is not advisable for learnability. I'm talking about the presence of some
feminine nouns ending in -ée, while others end in -é. A regularisation here
wouldn't make any problem.
- the silent |h| at the beginning of words (or inside some rare words). Though
helping for etymological reasons, it clashes with the so-called aspirate |h|,
rarer, but having a real phonemic status (namely, it prevents liaison, which is
in itself a strong power :)) ). Since the aspirate |h| is still present in
speech, maybe some regularisation could be used.
- Some latinate spellings coming from the time of Middle French, when it was
fashionable to respell words so that they look more like the Latin words people
thought they came from. From there come such doublets as conte/compte, which
used to be a single word with two different meaning (recount/count). Some, like
this doublet, may be useful to recognise two different meanings that should be
disambiguated, others are plain useless and painful. Yet they account for a
very small part of the vocabulary, nearly only present in specialised
vocabularies like scientific vocabulary, where the amount of borrowing from
Classical Latin or Greek makes it difficult to know whether we have a respelt
word or a borrowing from Classical Latin, and where problems of recognisability
seem more important than learnability (especially in the scientific community).
So a change may not bring as much advantage as supposed.

The rest of the French orthography is pretty phonemic, or at least does what it
can with the little resources of the Latin alphabet. Of course, there are small
problems like the fact that some sounds can be written in more than one way,
and that a few letters or digraphs can have two readings, but regularising them
would pose the problem of regularising them to what? All possibilities have
advantages and inconvenients, and the French orthography is already 95% regular
(if not entirely simple), so the advantage of regularisation would be too
minimal to bother.

You just cannot compare the English orthography, which is plain irregular, with
the French orthography, which is extremely regular, if not the simplest
orthography there is. I'm just not sure that we could make it simpler, in the
case of the French language. The French orthography is probably near optimal
for the language, and any change would make it less optimal rather than more.

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?).

>
> 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. 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. 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. 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.

> 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.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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