Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> John Cowan wrote:
> (re Syllabary for English)
> > About 10,000 characters... (snip)... My guess is that it is too large to
> be practical.
>
> Truly.  Quickly (and inaccurately I think) counting 22 C and 15 V/diphth.
> that's 330 CV's right off the bat, another 330 for VC.  Then it might be
> useful to have single symbols for common prefixes, common other initial
> sylls, and common suffixes, and common clusters, esp. s+stop and s+stop+r/l
> not to mention C+r/l and nasal+C.  You might have special symbols for things
> like Plural, Past Tense, -ing, agentive -er.
>
> The inventory could be reduced if we made it an abugida like Devanagari,
> with a vowel-killer, so 'man' could be written |m&.n\|  rather than
> cuneiform-style |m&.&n| .
>
> (Hmm, perhaps a modified Devanagari would work??)
While a manageable abugida for English should hardly be very hard to work out,
a very percentage of consonants would get a vowel killer (isn't there a less
murderous-sounding Sanskrit-derived term for that, BTW?), and most of the rest
would get a diacritic indicating a vowel other than the inherent one. English
phonology seems to rather work against the neater features of an abugida.

I've, BTW, always been somewhat mystified that someone ever came on the idea
of having graphemic zero indicate /a/ (or /O/ and so on depending on language)
rather than phonemic zero. In a language like Sanskrit it may perhaps save
typing, but it's certainly the last idea I would have stumbled on. People are
weird.

                                                       Andreas

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