Re: Optimum number of symbols

"Mike S." wrote:
> but a highly inflected language with alternating
> stems probably would not be.
I'm not sure alternating stems would necessarily be a problem unless
they were the *only* thing that distinguished various forms.  The
Japanese verb _kuru_ "to come", for example, has four stems, depending
on the ending, ku-, ki-, ke-, or ko-, but all four are written with the
same kanji, and you just have to know which one is intended.  If you
have [come]-ru, you know it's _kuru_, if you have [come]-ta, it's
_kita_, [come]-nai = konai, [come]-reba = kereba, etc.

Of course, a case like English sing/sang/sung would be a bigger problem,
unless you had a character (or perhaps some kind of diacritic?) that
meant "past tense" or "past participle" (or whatever the relevant
distinction is in that language).  Egyptian, IIRC, used 3 horizontal
lines to show "plural", but I'm not sure if they had a single plural
ending or not.

> Again, the claim here is relative easy
> for *all* languages.  Only the alphabet fits in this category.
I'm finding that you and I have gone from disagreeing to mostly
agreeing.  :-)

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