Re: Conscripts 101

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 15:06:53 -0500, Chris Peters <beta_leonis@...> wrote:
[...]
>What I have in mind as my goal for Ricadh is a Hangul-like alphabetic
>cluster system for the main content words, compounded with an ideographic
>mark-up system to write grammatical markers like verb tenses and noun cases.
>  Much the way that Japanese uses Kanji to write content words, and kana to
>write the grammatical bits.  (Even further down the line -- maybe my Ricadh
>speakers could even "reverse evolve" their syllable clusters *back* into
>ideography.)
Huh, that seems like quite an unlikely happening.  It seems (and this is
pure speculation) that it would take either or both
(1) the sound-spelling correspondence becoming so unpredictable that letters
within syllable clusters are no longer even guidelines as to what the sound
should be (worse than even Maggel...)
(2) so much collapsing and ligating, probably idiosyncratic to each cluster,
that the letters are no longer recognizable in a typical cluster.

I could believe it better if there were more ingredients to start with, say
if the system also contained determinatives (perhaps originally to
supplement a script which lacked many distinctions necessary for Ricadh
phonology) which took on further prominence as the syllabic component of the
writing became unrecognizable.  Or, maybe, if there was already a very
strong logographic component of the script, with many words for which the
syllabic system was already avoided -- I guess your markup for grammatical
morphemes gets you partway here, but the gap between grammatical bits and
content words is a fairly big one to generalize across.

What I do know of precedent for is this sort of thing happening when a
script gets borrowed: certain words remain written as they were in the
source language, despite being pronounced entirely differently.  Cuneiform
scripts did this all the time, but weren't originally phone*ic; a closer
parallel is Pahlavi, which was an abjad, and retained a number of Aramaic
spellings (e.g. 'king' was written |MLKA| as in Aramaic, but still
pronounced _shah_).  So if a neighbouring community borrowed the Ricadh
script and did this throughgoingly enough, you'd get your logographic script
arising from a Hanguloid one.

> Does such a beast exist in any natlang?  I wouldn't be
>surprised to find it in somebody else's conlang, so I'd like to see examples
>of those as well.
I'd particularly like to see any natexamples, too, now that we've seen a few
conexamples.

>Thanks ...
>:Chris
>
>PS:  Completely off-topic natscript question -- is there any historical
>reason why the Hebrew letter [samekh] is written identically to the Greek
>lower-case [sigma]?  And they even have an equivalent sound ...
I dunno if we can reconstruct the reason, but the various sibilant letters
got pretty confused between Phoenician and Greek.  Of the Greek sibilant
letters, which I'm taking to be
  zeta, xi, san, sigma, sampi,
none has the name that corresponds in Phoenician for its shape and position.
 Their positions and shapes correspond to
  zayin, samekh, s.ade, shin, (appended to the end as a new letter)
but their names to
  s.ade (?), (a systematic name from its sound), shin, samekh, (Greek "like
pi" ?).

Alex

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