Re: Chinese writing systems

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Barry Garcia
| Subject: Re: Chinese writing systems
|
| CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
|>  And thailand has its own alphabet, which is not roman.
|> But since it is an alphabet, it should be very easy to
|> learn, right? So why does no one (ok, not no one,
|> but not so many) try to learn thai?
|
| By the way, this is NOT an alphabet. It's an alphasyllabary
| and it's hard to learn because Thai has changed drastically
| from when the Thai adopted the alphabet. The glyphs have
| changed sound values, and some old thai sounds have merged
| with others, thus introducing complexity.
|

        My "Writing Systems of the World" book is at home, but as I recall,
there are other bugaboos.
        First off, most letters have an inherent tone. If you change the
tone, you can also change the sound/phoneme of the letter. As an example to
demonstrate (meaning I don't remember a real one and I'm pulling this out of
the air but it works for my purposes), say you have the letter pa with an
inherent tone of three. If you put a tone marker on pa3, it becomes, say,
ga. So, a letter can change phonemes depending on the tone you stick on it.
        Also, the final letters of words have collapses into 6 or 8 possible
sounds. You have sound-groups that collapse into a single sound. For example
(see above), let's say all final p, b, k, t, and d's collapse into the
phoneme "p" at the end of the word. One must memorize all of these groups,
and if a letter's sound-shift from a tone-shift puts it in a different
group, you must be mindful of this.

        I thought that Thai would be a really cool script to learn. Then I
saw how it works.

        Mike

______________________________________
Mike Karapcik   *       Tampa, FL
Network Analyst *       USF campus
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Research Center
ConlangCode: v1.1 CIT !h+ !u cG:M:R:S:G a+ y n30:3
B+++/R:Wic A+ E+ N1 Is/d K ia-:+ p-- s- m o P S----


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