Re: Optimum number of symbols

En réponse à Kendra <kendra@...>:

>
> Ah, thank you very much! I am (somewhat) familiar with the IPA,
> actually.
> I don't use it a lot to describe pronunciation, th ough, because so
> few
> people have ever heard of it... I tend to describe things in the terms
> of in
> which words they are present.
>
Which is something you shouldn't do, especially if you''re using English words,
because of the many divergent dialects of English and the internationality of
the list. Saying something like "like the |a| of |father|" could lead to five
or six possible sounds, depending on the origin of the reader. Or you may
simply be misunderstood if you're talking to a foreigner who knows English only
as a second language and speaks it with his own accent which has nothing to do
with any English dialect out there :)) . So on this list basically use the IPA,
or you'll never be sure you can be understood correctly.

>
> Also true, but I think english has a hideously large vocabulary compared
> to
> other languages, though I could be mistaken.
>
Actually, English doesn't have more vocabulary than most languages of
civilisation. That's an erroneous idea. Even the Guiness Book lists French for
having the largest vocabulary rather than English (but I won't back up this
claim, as I have no idea how you can even count a vocabulary :)) ). And a lot
of the English vocabulary consists of words and derivatives and compounds which
could easily be written using strings of characters (actually, I think I've
seen such an attempt to write English using the Chinese characters, though I
don't remember where I saw it), like it's done in Chinese already. So I doubt
that English would need more characters than Chinese does. I'm not even sure it
would be unfit. After all, English is arguably even more isolating than
Chinese :))) .

>
> Same here, though for some reason I really like Japanese. I've never
> actually  sat down and tried to learn the Japanese syllabaries, just
> picked
> them up (through osmosis or who knows what,) which is what makes me
> think
> they're relatively simple and intuitive.
> I can't write to save my life though. I get the two alphabets mixed up
> and
> give my literate friends headaches. :)
>
:))) I tend to have the same problem :)) . Actually, I love Japanese too. It's
just the script that I don't find special (nice-looking yes, but I prefer
Tibetan for that :)) ).

>
> I feel like I'm wandering off topic, but I really want to know: How does
> one
> use the IPA extensions in unicode [in html, even]? It's frustrating me
> that
> I can't use the sassy n-with-a-tail, because I really like that better
> than
> q (which is the Tiri'n transliteration for 'ng', which appears to be N
> in
> the ASCII thing. Fancy!)
>
Well, it depends on what you use to write you texts. In Word, you need to use
the Insert Symbol feature, choose a font containing IPA symbols and adding them
by hand. In HTML, you need to specify the encoding for the page (and I don't
remeber how you do that :(( , probably a <META CHARSET="...> command or
something like that :)) ) and use the Unicode codes in the form &#xxxx; where
xxxx is the code number in decimal. Other people on this list know more than me
about this.

>
> Am I wrong to think this has more to do with the fact that spelling is
> standardized, while pronunciation changes continually, which is no fault
> of
> the system itself? I'd think that syllabic systems would behave
> similarly,
> were such changes present, though I'm not edumacated enough to know
> so.
>
Yes indeed, this is part of the explanation. But as I said in an earlier post,
you can justify most of the oddities of the French orthography if you bear in
mind some strange things in French phonology, which would be a nightmare to
represent phonemically.

>
> I failed a quiz on passé compose for this specific reason. Damn you,
> "Les
> autres patineuses sont tombées!" Damn you and your outdated gender
> roles! (I
> love french, don't get me wrong, but... man)
>
Sorry to have gender in our language. But we're a majority here (I mean that
most languages in the world have gender or class systems, while only a minority
doesn't have them, and even then may have kept some remnants of them :)) ).

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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