Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
>
>
>>My two sets of questions are:
>>A. Do you agree that the ideal set of symbols to express language is in
>>the region of 170 to 200? If not, why not and what do you consider to be
>>the ideal number of symbols?
....

> Four options, basically:
>
> 1) Alphabetic system for a Khoisan language (well, an abugida or abjad, possibly
> with mandatory vowel marks, should work about as well).
>
> 2) Syllabary for a language with a reasonable number of syllables. English,
> !Kung and Rotokas are emphatically _not_ examples of such languages. I guess
Rotokas has only 35 syllables.  Maybe you can make a syllabary for them and
use the other 165 symbols as logograms for the most common 2 and
3-syllable words?

> 3) An onset-rhyme system as someone suggested.
I think I missed that.

> 4) An alphabet with additional signs to indicate common sequences. Latin and
> Greek, of course, already does this - 'x', xi, psi - but our hypothetical
Also the Greek Zeta, according to one textbook - /dz/

> script here would have dozens of them. I rather like this idea, because it's
Or an alphabet for as many phonemes as your language has, plus
(200 minus phoneme count) logograms for the most common words/morphemes.

> 5) Newspeak! Restrict the number of morphemes to 200 - the underlings need no
> way to express the idea of "rights" anyway!
Recently on the Toki Pona mailing list there has been a discussion of
adapting or inventing either a set of logograms, or a syllabary, for
Toki Pona (which, as of the last deletions by the author, has only 118
words/morphemes).  118 logograms would be fairly easy to learn,
but I think the consensus is heading toward creating a
featural syllabary.


- Jim Henry
http://www.mindspring.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm

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