Re: Featural Alphabets

Tim May wrote:
> Henrik Theiling wrote at 2005-10-15 00:57:47 (+0200)
>  > Hi!
>  >
>  > tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...> writes:
>  > >...
>  > > King Sejong's Hangeul system for Korean is supposed to be a
>  > > featurography, but I don't think it really is.
>  > >...
>  >
>  > Hmm??  Errm, how close a look did you have?  The layout of the vowel
>  > letters (almost!) looks like an IPA vowel space map and the consonants
>  > are also obviously assigned by POA plus consonant modifications
>  > (e.g. 'plus one stroke') do the same thing to different letters
>  > (e.g. add voicing).  It's strange to me that you say that that system
>  > is not really featural.  It looks surprisingly featural to me and also
>  > very constructed.
Yes - I find Tom's comment strange also. Why isn't it featural?

> Indeed, there's very definitely a featural basis to the script, though
> the underlying analysis isn't necessarily the one we would make.
Yes, way back in the 15th cent King Sejong the Great didn't know
anything about the distinctive feature theories of phonology that were
going to be around five centuries in the future   :)

But nevertheless it is strongly featural. As Tim points out:
>Look
> at the consonant grid below, for example.  I don't know nearly enough
> about Hangul, but I think I've captured the basic idea behind the
[etc snipped]

Yep - and I guess it was noticed that the bit patterning of brz was
featural   ;)
That's why I said brz could be mapped to Tengwar.
======================================

Dirk Elzinga wrote:
 > Hey.
 >
 > For featural alphabets predating the list, look at Tolkien's Tengwar
 > found in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. It is not completely
 > feature-based, but enough is that I would give him pride of place
 > among featural conscripts.

Amen.

That's why I suggested brz could be mapped to Tengwar. Arguably, the
least satisfactory mapping is to Roman letters.
======================================

Herman Miller wrote:
[snip]
 > Francis Lodwick's "Essay towards an Universal Alphabet" (published in
 > 1686,
[snip]
 > Here, I found a picture of it on an Italian web page:
 >
 > http://www.soronel.it/Universalfabeto.html

Yep - and I am fairly certain other 17th cent theorists came up with
featural writing systems. Somewhere at the back of my mind I seem to
recall reading somewhere that one of these was the inspiration for Isaac
Pitman's (phonetic) shorthand, which is largely featural IIRC.

 > 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.

Ooh yes - I had forgotten that. I came across this decades ago,
Apparently Kenneth Pike also used analphabetic featural notation also; see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_notation

Featural writing systems most certainly predate this list!

--
Ray
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