Re: Optimum number of symbols

Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:

>"Mike S." wrote:
>> IMO, written
>> ancient Greek and Latin both fall solidly into the category of
>> phonemic scripts, the occasional quirk or irregularity notwithstanding.
>
>There were several contrasts not captured by the script.  For example,
>the Romans rarely marked long and short vowels, even tho it had the
>possibility, and Greek had no way of indicating certain vowel contrasts
>like (IIRC) /a/ and /a:/
That was the one biggie.  In Latin, semivowels and <Q> if you want
to get picky.  Other than that, highly phonemic.



>> It's true that these scripts, which might be called proto-alphabetic,
>> indeed marked consonant phonemes.  As I understand it--I might be
>> wrong--most of these languages (unlike Greek) had only a few vowel
>> phonemes, and thus could more easily afford not marking them.
>
>It was more that the vowels could be predicted from common patterns.
>Vowels are less important.
I believe you, but I am surprised that they could so easily dispense
with vowels altogether, considering they must have had structure
words and so forth outside the triconsonantal domain.  Interesting.



>Arabic-style with vowel marks
>Advantages:
>  Useful for Semitic languages, where consonant groups are of the utmost
>    importance, relationship between various forms easier to see than
>    with a "true" alphabet
>Disadvantages:
>  ?  (I actually can't see any disadvantages to a *fully vowel-marked*
>    Arabic-style alphabet)
Does this system export well to non Semitic phonologies?



>"True" Alphabet
>Advantages:
>  Paucity of characters, presumed ease of learning
>  Flexibility
>  Easier to make abstract descriptions of a language when one must deal
>    with single phones
This might be included under the flexibility category, but I think
it's worth mentioning: universality.  No other basic system lends
itself to every language ever spoken in such a trivially easy way.



>Disadvantages:
>  Lack of conciseness, requiring more characters than any other system
>    per word
>  Highly abstract
>  Frequently multiple pronunciations per character; not sure if this is
>    a valid criticism, as I know in detail of only one syllabry, kana,
>    in which each character has only one phonemic pronunciation
>    (considering the forms with diacritics to be distinct characters)
>
>Syllabry
>Advantages:
>  Small number of characters, much easier to learn than logograms
>  Arguably easier to learn than alphabets
>  More concise than alphabets, fewer characters required per word
>Disadvantages
>  More characters than alphabets
>  Less flexible
>  Less useful for languages with complex syllables
All the systems you mention up to this point above seem relatively
equivalent in their viability to me.  I would point out here though
that all of them rely on encoding the phonemic sequence of spoken
speech, or very similar phonetic data, in one way or another.
Thus they are not without a common thread;  they all accomplish
encoding speech using very similar devices.  It is the advancement
to the point of discovering this same common thread which is primarily
what I am referring to when I speak of the evolution of scripts.

The only exception to this common thread I see is the nonfeatural
syllabary, which in your classificational system is not distinguished
from the featural type.  This system strikes me as unique in relying
entirely on a different level of analysis of speech than all the other
systems.



>Logographs
>Advantages:
>  Much more concise, one character per morpheme (generally speaking)
>  Better recognition, easier to recognize a single character than a
>    clump of characters
>  Better interlinguistic recognition, in cases of a system used in
>    different languages (e.g., "dialects" of Chinese)
>  Ease of distinguishing homophones
>Disadvantages
>  Huge number of characters, very difficult to learn
>  Phonetic and semantic clues of varying degrees of usefulness when
>    faced with a new character (especially when adapted to an unrelated
>    language)
>  Low degree of flexibility, a new character must be created for a new
>    word
>  Difficulty of indicating inflections makes it hard to adapt to
>    non-isolating languages without mixing in phonetic elements (as
>    with Japanese's mixing of kanji and kana)
I tend to think this might be the optimal system for reading speed and
comprehension.  Everything else about it strikes me as a nightmare.



>I tend to think that in most cases, a mixing of systems is best.
>English benefits greatly from the use of logographs like 2, $, ¢, c, +,
>=, &, @, #, %, etc.  Mathematicians use what amounts to a logographic
>system regularly.  Syllabic elements can be useful too, in those
>languages that are suited to it.  Conciseness and (presumably) reading
>speed could be improved in an alphabetic system by incorporating
>syllabic or polyphonic (like, say, consonant clusters) elements, just as
>flexibility can be added to a syllabry by incorporating alphabetic
>elements.  The balance of parts depends on the language and, in part, on
>subjective decisions.  Would it be advantageous to have a character that
>means "the", just as we have one that means "and"?  It could make
>writing a bit more concise, but would also create a new character to
>learn.
These things might be beneficial, but everything from typresetting
to computers might have to be adjusted to make the accommodations.



>> It is clear to me that scripts arose through a centuries-long
>> evolutionary process, in which enhancements were gradually added.
>
>Yet, you yourself admit that English is less efficient.  Just because
>something is the result of evolution doesn't mean it's better, it might
>just be an historical accident.  And, also, the alphabet didn't evolve
>from a syllabry, but rather from a logographic script that came to be
>used to show partial phonetic info (specifically, only consonants), was
>simplified to show only single phones (still just consonants) and then
>came to be fleshed out by adding vowels.
The folks who standardized English orthography a few centuries
apparently were more concerned with pretending they were in ancient
Rome and Greece and Norman France than making English more efficient.
Noone has been able to do anything significant about it ever since.

Your classification was a neat overview and I agree with almost
all of your major points.


Regards

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