Re: Optimum number of symbols

Cristophe said:
> Welcome! And there are no secret rules in this group, apart from the
common
> respect rule :)) . Everybody is welcome to participate, whatever their
> knowledge. After all, we all have to learn from others :)) .
Woot, awesome. I kind of tripped over the link without a clue. so I wasn't
sure.

In that case, though, what's all this /Q/ and /a/ business? I can figure out
some of it from context, but would like to know I'm getting them right. I
didn't see anything of this on the FAQ that was mailed out a few days ago,
and if it was there and I missed it, my many apologies, I'm somewhat out of
sorts right now (too much random work. baaah!)

Completely off topic and meaningless, are there any females on this list? It
just struck me that I haven't seen (well, *recognized* one female name in my
mailbox! (Just curious. ;)

> > Also, Is there any evidence that syllabic writing systems might be
> > more
> > intuitive to create?
>
> Apart from the fact that you find syllabic features in nearly all scripts
of
> the world, except maybe the purest alphabetic or ideographic ones? :)))
>
Heheh, that answers my question. My train of thought is basically that it's
easier to memorize words as a whole than their parts, which then leads to
parts (syllables), which then leads to letters.
Ideograms would be too cumbersome for a language with an expansive
vocabulary (can you imagine english? Yeesh. I think we have something insane
like 10,000 words? I forget.)

Though to be honest, I really prefer alphabetic writing systems because it's
fun to put completely random letters together and see what happens.
*another random thought*
I wonder how acronyms work in languages which use syllabic scripts? Or do
they not at all?

Yes, I am obviously a monoglot. But I'm trying! :)

> > I would agree that syllabic systems are easier to learn (i've retained
> > a
> > remarkable amount of Hiragana and Katakana and can read it somewhat,
> > despite
> > having never actually used it,) though cumbersome when 'importing'
> > words...
>
> No more than alphabetic scripts. Just look at how Spanish imports words!!
(or
> how French does, keeping the spelling but pronouncing it with French
phonemes,
> thus cutting nearly completely the link between the written word and the
spoken
> one).
That's true, but at least you can recognize things written, even if you
pronounce them really strangely. With Japanese (since it's the only thing I
can think of that I'd be remotely familiar with,) I'm lost on both counts.
(And I keep wanting to write "framiliar!" A lot of people around here say
framiliar. I wonder where that came
from.)
French in general is crazy. It seems like it's all vowels to me. Speaking it
gives me a headache. (But that doesn't stop me!)

Pointless rant about french: I asked my teacher to give me second-year work
for the summer, and he told me to take a class at a college (I'm a
highschool student.) However, I doubt my mom wants to take me all the way to
out somewhere, since the community college doesn't offer second-year French
over the summer. Bah! Bah I say!

John Cowan said:

> Cultural/ethnic/religious barriers can divide standard languages as
> well, sometimes to the point that colloquial languages achieve mutual
> unintelligibility. For instance: Serbian and Croatian, Hindi and Urdu.
I can hardly understand some people with whom I go to school, for that
matter.

Cristophe Grandsire wrote"
> En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:
>
> >
> > First off, you can start off by learning only the basic characters.
> > To
> > teach a child to read, you must first get the child to be able to
> > understand how to connect abstractions like /k/ and /a/ to make a
> > pronounceable syllable /ka/.  You do not need to do this with a
> > syllabry, you already have /ka/ right there.  After they get the basic
> > concept of reading, then you can go into the abstract diacritics.  For
> > that matter, I'm not sure if you'd even need to teach the diacritics
> > as
> > characters.  Does anyone know if Japanese children learn the
> > double-dots
> > as an abstract diacritic, or do they simply learn _ka_ and _ga_ as if
> > they were separate characters, the way English-speaking children
> > aren't
> > actually taught the relationship between s-sh and t-th?
> >
> [ snipped story]
> So you can imagine how heartedly I agree with the statement that
syllabaries
> are easier to learn than alphabets :)) .
>
I would tentatively agree. I had no problems learning the roman alphabet
when I was very little (my mother always had an alphabet chart over our
fireplace for some reason!) and casually picking up the japanese syllabic
alphabets was similarly easy 10 years later. Tiri'n (alphabetical) took me
only a day to learn, but I STILL don't use the correct vowels.

I hope multiple replies like this aren't forbidden or something? I don't
want to spam the list with my short answers...:)

-Kendra
http://www.refrigeratedcake.com
http://www.refrigeratedcake.com/other/theatre -- Vade Mecum (comic)

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