Re: Optimum number of symbols

On Thu, 23 May 2002 01:46:20 -0400, Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:

>"Mike S." wrote:
>> Some scripts can be more featural than others.  I gather that Hangul
>> is one of the most highly featural--I think ppl often mistake it
>> for an alphabet.
>
>It IS an alphabet, albeit one with an unusual layout.
That's what I said!  An alphabet with an unusual layout.  Exactly.

Unfortunately, there might be different opinions on the matter,
if I gather correctly.  It seems that whether or not a script is
an alphabet or a syllabary is determined by what a basic character
of the script (grapheme) as whole represents, not what its parts
represent.   Now the question that I will throw back to you is,
can the consonant and vowel parts in Hangul stand by themselves
the way letters in the Roman alphabet can?  Or do they always
appear together in composite characters?



>In fact, more so
>than just an alphabet, each character encodes information about the
>phoneme itself, like, place of articulation and manner of articulation.
>
>> Each stands for a syllable, and that's it.
>
>Mine has characters for syllables that cannot be broken down at all.
>There's no similarity between _ka_ and _ku_, for example, or between
>_ku_ and _tu_, but there are some that can be broken down.  The Cli
>characters, for example, almost all contain the character for _li_
>(those that don't contain the archaic _le_ character - an earlier stage
>of the language had /i e a @ o u/ as vowels, now it has just /i a u/),
>likewise, Cla contains _la_, and Clu contains _lu_ (or the archaic _lo_
>character - or maybe it was the _lo_ that gives modern _lu_, and the
>_lu_ that died out as an independant character, I forget.), and, there
>are elements to indicate coda consonants and gemination as well as
>length.  There used to be a mark for stress, but it was lost when stress
>ceased to be contrastive.  There's also an independant character
>indicating solitary _l_, but that's frequently written smaller and
>turned into a diacritic of its own.  Some writers go so far as to write
>all syllables in one clump, even those that require multiple characters
>(like, say, tiai - written ti-a-i may be written in a single clump with
>ti on top, a in the middle, and i on the bottom)  I suspect there may be
>styles that merge all diacritics and clumped characters into one stroke,
>giving the appearance of total non-featuralness.  :-)
>
>So, I would say that my conlang uses a syllabry with some degree of
>featuralness.  Given the sound-changes I have in mind for Chúju (a
>descendant), it's likely to become a mixed system, with some syllabic
>characters, some alphabetic, and some with a default vowel.  It's gonna
>be a confusing system, but, hopefully, regular, system.  Should be fun
>once I've worked it out.  :-)
This sounds complex enough to resist immediate classification,
I would think :-)  Definitely not an alphabet though, whatever Hangul is.

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