Re: Conscripts 101

>From: Alex Fink
>
>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.

What I had in mind for the Ricadh conculture (which started as alien, then
got humanized) is a culture that was originally enlightened and scientific
in nature, then devolved into a caste hierarchy with an upper-class "keepers
of the knowledge".  Education and formal writing skills were reserved only
for those upper-class folks.  The common masses, without the benefit of
education, started simplifying and abbreviating the formal writing, so much
so that the abbreviated versions became ideographic representations of the
corresponding words, and the ideography stuck when the upper caste was cast
off.

Similar to the process in Japan (somewhat reversed, in a sense) where
knowledge of Kanji is considered a sign of education, and education was once
reserved only for men.  Kana first developed as a reduction of Kanji, and
one of its earliest uses was to allow "uneducated" women to write.  (Then it
took hold to fill in the blanks where Kanji leaves off in written Japanese
-- you can't write verb endings in a purely ideographic language -- and all
Japanese people today learn compound writing.)

:Chris

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