Re: Featural Alphabets (was Re: Boustrophedon and Chinese (was Re: A single font can

tomhchappell wrote:

> 2. "Featural Alphabets" really intrigue me.  Alexander Melville
> Bell's "Visible Speech" system is the closest thing to a "Featural
> Alphabet" I've ever seen.
> King Sejong's Hangeul system for Korean is supposed to be a
> featurography, but I don't think it really is.
> Something that had each "characteristic feature" denoted by a
> particular one of Gary's tinkertoys would be more of a "featural
> alphabet".
> Is anyone onlist aware of any "featural alphabets" predating the
> existence of the ConLang list?
>
> Thank you.
>
> Tom H.C. in MI
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).

I've had an interest in Visible Speech for a long time after seeing an
exhibit in a museum in Canada, and at one time even did a translation of
my home page:

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/index-vs.html

I don't know how accurate this is; it wasn't easy at the time to find
information about Visible Speech. But VS was one of the inspirations
that led me to develop the Tharkania and Ljörr writing systems. You'll
probably need the Teamouse VS font to view this, unless you happen to
have another Visible Speech font lying around.

ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/hmiller/fonts/tmousevs.ttf

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 α„β0fγ„δ2εɪζ3 (the "f" should be a
superscript).

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