Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform
| From: | Roger Mills <romilly@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Wednesday, January 28, 2004, 12:59 |
|---|
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??)
Logically, one would want voiced/voiceless C pairs to differ only slightly,
but logic seems seldom to have reigned in the evolution of writing
systems...:-)))))))))))
Fun to think about, but I'm not going to pursue it.
Replies