Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform

Quoting Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>:

> Every once and a while spelling reform rears its ugly
> head, and it was one of the first things I looked at
> when starting my project to create mutant English.
>
> But there is a way to _get_ spelling reform without
> _doing_ spelling reform: Replace the Romanji Aplhabet
> with a syllabary.
>
> That's raises the question, just how large would a
> syllabary have to be to semi-accurately represent all
> existing English words?
Impractically. I don't know how big the pool of valid English syllables is,
but I've seen figures of 4k-6k. Ambiguizing that down to a handleable
orthography (or at least a number where you mightn't just as well use hanzi)
would, I dare predict, result in unreadability.

> 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.

                                                         Andreas

Reply