Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

On Wednesday, August 11, 2004, at 04:18 , Gary Shannon wrote:

> --- 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.
It's very clear, however, that that is not what Y.R. Chao had in mind.

> As soon as
> people start talking about more than an alphabet they
> get locked into the sylabry mode of thinking because
Not at all! I can think of many non-alphabetic systems besides syllabaries.
  If I'd got locked into syllabary mode, there would have been no point in
my raising this matter in the first place.

> they can't seem to shake off the notion that a symbol
> MUST represent a sound.  Not so.
A symbol per-se may represent many things other than sound. But Chao was
talking about symbols to represent _language_, since he said: "Ideally,
the quest for a universal system of symbols, be it for natural languages
or for an artificial language,....." - and so was I. All the natural
language scripts I know of, whether logographic, syllabic, alphabetic, or
mixed (liked ancient Egyptian) represent both sound and meaning, i.e.
human language.

It seems that Chao, brought up with the thousands of symbols of the
Chinese logographic system was struck by the paucity of symbols in our
alphabetic systems, and thought the best would be somewhere between. But
he also made it clear that he in his view both the Chinese & English
systems present _both_ the meaning _and_ the sound associated with that
meaning. In his view (and mine) "The important difference is that of the
size and variety of the units".

> 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.
Not by any means a new idea. Several 17th century thinkers, e.g. Descartes
& Leibniz, entertained basically the same idea though they never arrived
at any system. Some, however, did do so, e.g. George Dalgarno's "Universal
Character" and Bishop John Wilkins' "Real Character".

Also, I believe Blissymbolics attempts to do just this - see my email on
Icons.

I am not saying that your idea is not worth pursuing. I say that it is not
what I was asking about. Also, although it's not a new idea, clearly none
of the previous solutions have convinced many (tho maybe Blissymbolics
will be more successful); so if that is your interest, then go for it.

Ray
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