Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
> On Monday, January 26, 2004, at 09:01 PM,
> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Quoting Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>:
>
> [snip]
>
> >> Is there such a thing as a vowel-first
> syllabary?
> >> Some preliminary dinking around seems to
> show that
> >> vowel-first symbols (like "ak" and "or"
> instead of
> >> "ka" and "ro") might work better for
> English.
> >
> > I'm not quite sure what you are speaking of,
> but if you're thinking of
> > something like the Old Persian habit of
> writing syllables with two signs,
> > like 'da'-'ar' for /dar/, Old Persian, or
> cuneiform and cuneiform-derived
> > scripts in general, might be the place to
> look.
>
> Yep - I was going to suggest cuneiform.
THA-A-YA\MA-A-KA\RA-I-I-DI-GA-GA\A\BA-I-TA-SHA\
THA-U-WA\MA-A-YA-NA-DA\YA-U-WA\A-I\YA-U-ZA\THA-I-MA\I-NA\TA-LA-RA-I-YA-NA\\

> But the ancient Akkadian cuneiform, which was
> used for writing other langs besides
> Akkadian, contained a whole range of signs for
> both CV and VC syllables
> much as
> in the later Persian system Andrew mentions
> above. It would be possible to
> adapt
> either the Akkadian or the Old Persian system
> to English.  But I fail to
> see how
> this would be any improvement on what we now
> have.  However, it could be an
> interesting experiment.
As far as I can tell, Persian cuneiform was
consonant first. There were signs for A, I and U
however, which could be combined with other signs
to make a vowel first syllable.

Padraic.



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