Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform

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.  I know of no syllabaries that are
exclusive vowel first, and I'b be very surprised if any such existed or had
existed as AFAIK no natlang consists only of blocked syllables beginning
with
vowels only.

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.
 =========================================================================

On Monday, January 26, 2004, at 09:22 PM, Steve Cooney wrote:

[snip]
> syllabaries, but Korean is made up of sound components
> in clusters that are essentially an alphabet.
Quite so. Permitted consonant clusters both at the beginning
and ends of syllables means the permitted numbers of monosyllables
in English is very high. If one wants to write English syllabically,
the only practical way I see is of using some system like Korean
where the syllabic sign is composed of signs representing individual
phonemes - i.e. as Steve says, essentially an alphabet.

But whether you go for a mix of CV and VC syllables as in the old
cuneiform scripts or something more akin to the Korean system, you
ain't half going to make life difficult for all those youngsters that
seem to spend a large part of their lives texting one another on
their mobile phones  :)

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
===============================================
"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
interfere with language."         J.G. Hamann, 1760

Replies