Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

<snip>
>
> 2. "I often speculate whether an ideal system of
> writing would not be some
> golden mean between the unwieldy thousands of
> arbitrary units and the
> paltry few letters of the Latin alphabet.
<snip>

I'm going to refer back to my post of 29 Mar, 2004
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0403E&L=conlang&P=R1634&D=0&H=0&O=T&T=1&m=48753

The idea I wanted to play with was a collection of
symbols that DOES NOT REPRESENT SOUNDS.  As soon as
people start talking about more than an alphabet they
get locked into the sylabry mode of thinking because
they can't seem to shake off the notion that a symbol
MUST represent a sound.  Not so.

My idea was for each symbol to represent some basic
notion, utterly independant of the sound one makes in
any particular language for that notion.  By stringing
elemental notions together more speicific words are
formed, but the symbols contain no hint at the
pronounciation, thus the same written language might
be pronounced in a variety of different ways.

--gary

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