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Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 11, 2004, 16:26
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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Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>zeta, ksi etc (was: THEORY Ideal system of writing)