Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform

Gary Shannon scripsit:

> That's raises the question, just how large would a
> syllabary have to be to semi-accurately represent all
> existing English words?
About 10,000 characters.  While this is nowhere near as large as the
Han script, with more than 70,000 characters in Unicode already and
more to be added later, it is much larger than any known syllabary
(Ethiopic has 345, Unified Canadian has 630), and much larger than the
4,000-odd characters that most literate Han-speakers actually know.
My guess is that it is too large to be practical.

> 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.
http://www.daimi.au.dk/~bek/thesis_html/node34.html suggests using
a scheme in which each character encodes either an initial consonant
(cluster) plus the (first half of a) vowel, or else the (second half of a
vowel plus the) final consonant (cluster).  This would require about 2000
characters, within the tolerable limit.  Bopomofo is something like this.

--
Not to perambulate                 John Cowan <jcowan@...>
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during the hours of repose         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    in the boots of ascension.       --Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel

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