Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

Ray Brown scripsit:

> B. Obvously, 170 to 200 is too small an inventory for all the morphemes
> of a language, yet it seems rather high for a syllabary. Y.R. Chao does
> not elaborate on what each of the 170 to 200 symbols would represent,
> except the brief reference to monosyllables in (3). Any ideas?
That's because you're thinking of syllabaries for vowel-rich,
syllable-poor languages like Japanese, Cherokee, and perhaps Old Persian
cuneiform.  Among the writing systems encoded as syllabaries in Unicode,
Ethiopic has 317 syllables (not all used in any one language), Yi has
1164 syllables (including tone information -- each tone has up to 345
syllables), and Canadian Syllabics has 630 syllables (not all used in
any one language).

Of these, Ethiopic and CS are actually abugidas under the covers, which
makes them easier to learn.  But Yi really does have 819 distinct
and graphically unrelated syllabograms distributed over three tones;
the fourth tone is written using an inverted breve over the characters
used for one of the other tones.

In a toneless language with 12 initial consonants, 5 vowels, and 3
possible codas (zero, -n, and -ng, as in Mandarin), 180 characters
would be required for a syllabary.  Mandarin itself would need about 400
characters without tone information, or about 1200 with tone information.

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