Re: Featural Alphabets

Hi all,

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
> Hallo!
>
> Herman Miller wrote:
>
> > I had a sort of "featural alphabet" before the list, but it was
> > cumbersome and I never really used it. I believe it was called Atylat or
> > something like that. The Gargoyle alphabet from Ultima VI also has
> > featural elements (as much as Visible Speech or Tengwar, at least).
>
> It is not easy to come up with a featural alphabet that is neither
> cumbersome nor bedeviled by letters looking all too much alike.
> I can tell because I drafted and tossed several featural scripts.
So did I!  I started from the premise that a cursive script evolves
naturally from the efforts of scribes to write a block letter script
quickly.  (Perhaps I was taking my own quickscript too literally - it's
nothing but "joined-up printing".)  So with that in mind, I devised a
phonetic typeface consisting of straight lines and dots.  From
memory, my chief difficulty in using it was that some characters
were rather too similar.  A little more planned redundancy would
have helped, I think.  The older I get, the better I understand the
need for large type and greater differentiation between similar
objects.  And having a small degree of astigmatism doesn't help.
I'm sure I'd do it differently today ...


> > [...]
> > Francis Lodwick's "Essay towards an Universal Alphabet" (published in
> > 1686, and mentioned in an article in Jim Allan's book _An Introduction
> > to Elvish_) appears to be more or less a featural alphabet, as far as
> > the consonants go.
> >
> > Here, I found a picture of it on an Italian web page:
> >
> > http://www.soronel.it/Universalfabeto.html
>
> Nice!  I wonder how much Tolkien was influenced by it.
Here's an open question - has anyone "translated" Lodwick's Universal
Alphabet into IPA, or even CXS?  As I don't read much Italian, I may
be missing something that's there in plain sight on the page.


> > But probably one of the most "featural" of scripts would be Otto
> > Jespersen's "Analphabetic Notation". Each phonetic sound is written as
> > an unwieldy string of Greek letters, numerals, superscripts, and
> > symbols. Daniels and Bright's _The World's Writing Systems_ gives the
> > example of [n], which is written as αâ??β0fγâ??δ2εɪζ3 (the "f"
should be a
> > superscript).
>
> Peter Bleackly once invented a featural code based on the Latin
> alphabet, later to be aptly named "stribography" (which means `twisted
> writing'):
>
>
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0309B&L=conlang&P=R2825
>
> It won the 2003 Andreas Award.
>
Jörg,
Thanks for that link.  The famous soliloquy would certainly take
longer for a "stribographer" to write down than for a Tee-line
stenographer :-).  But the notion has merit, in that it uses only
the commonest available symbols.

Regards,
Yahya

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