Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

On Aug 9, 2004, at 12:23 PM, John Cowan wrote:

> 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.
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.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts." - Thomas Carlyle

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