Hallo!
Herman Miller wrote:
> I had a sort of "featural alphabet" before the list, but it was
> cumbersome and I never really used it. I believe it was called Atylat or
> something like that. The Gargoyle alphabet from Ultima VI also has
> featural elements (as much as Visible Speech or Tengwar, at least).
It is not easy to come up with a featural alphabet that is neither
cumbersome nor bedeviled by letters looking all too much alike.
I can tell because I drafted and tossed several featural scripts.
> [...]
>
> Francis Lodwick's "Essay towards an Universal Alphabet" (published in
> 1686, and mentioned in an article in Jim Allan's book _An Introduction
> to Elvish_) appears to be more or less a featural alphabet, as far as
> the consonants go.
>
> Here, I found a picture of it on an Italian web page:
>
>
http://www.soronel.it/Universalfabeto.html> But probably one of the most "featural" of scripts would be Otto
> Jespersen's "Analphabetic Notation". Each phonetic sound is written as
> an unwieldy string of Greek letters, numerals, superscripts, and
> symbols. Daniels and Bright's _The World's Writing Systems_ gives the
> example of [n], which is written as αâ??β0fγâ??δ2εɪζ3 (the "f" should be a
> superscript).
Peter Bleackly once invented a featural code based on the Latin
alphabet, later to be aptly named "stribography" (which means `twisted
writing'):
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0309B&L=conlang&P=R2825
It won the 2003 Andreas Award.
Greetings,
Jörg.