Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

John Cowan wrote:

> Dirk Elzinga scripsit:
>
>
>>What about a demisyllabic system which has one set of characters for
>>syllable onsets, and another for syllable rhymes? You'd need fewer
>>characters than for a fully fledged syllabary, but more than for an
>>alphabet. Hmong has such a system with 60 onsets and 104 rhymes
>>(including tonal information); at 164 symbols that is squarely within
>>Y. R. Chao's preferred range.
>
>
> The bopomofo system of writing Mandarin uses an initial and 1-2
> characters for each final, plus a tone diacritic.
I have sometimes wondered about the feasability of including the
tone diacritic in the Final grapheme rather than having diacritics
for the tones.  Alternatively, since the tones of Mandarin are
analyzable as binary compounds of High and Low, one could express
the first component of the tone in the Initial grapheme and the
second component in the Final grapheme.  Although this latter
militates against Mandarin speakers' language instinct it is the
method actually employed in Tibetan and some S-E-Asian scripts.
I have even devised a romanization of Tibetan on this principle...

/BP 8^) -- who has filled his message quota for today and has 182
unread CONLANG messages to go after having been away for four days...
--
B.Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)

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