Re: Optimum number of symbols

"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.  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.  :-)

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