Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

On Aug 9, 2004, at 3:36 PM, Paul Bennett wrote:

> On Mon, 09 Aug 2004 14:31:25 -0600, Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...>
> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Yeah. Okay. Sounds good. I'm trying to start to think of a first
> approximation of the list of onsets in English.
>
> 0-
> b-
> bl-
> br-
> bj-
> tS-
> tSj-
>
> and so on. I think I'll take it off-line. It'll be much less messy that
> way.
It's going to be messy wherever you choose to deal with it :-).

> One quick question: I *think* the common -j- element that looks like
> it's
> going to crop up a lot is largely (only?) associated with /u(:)/ in the
> peak/coda. Is it best dealt with from a practical standpoint as a
> feature
> of the latter?
In a paper which appeared in the journal _Phonology_ in 1995, Mike
Hammond and Stuart Davis argue that when /j/ occurs in CGV sequences (G
= glide) it is part of the syllable nucleus, while /w/ in the same
position is part of the onset. The restricted distribution you already
noted is part of their argument, as is the different treatment of /CwV/
and /CjV/ sequences in language games like Pig Latin and the Name Game.
The Pig Latin facts are fun. In Pig Latin, the onset of the first
syllable of a word is moved to the end and /e/ added to it. So for a
word like 'queen', the Pig Latin form is [inkwe] showing that the /w/
is part of the onset. However, a word like 'cute' becomes [jutke]
rather than [utkje], showing that the /j/ is part of the nucleus. They
mention that there are varieties of Pig Latin which allow [utkje], but
none which allow [winke] for 'queen'.

I think it's a clever argument.

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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