> 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@...>
> the corridors
>
http://www.reutershealth.com
> during the hours of repose
>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> in the boots of ascension. --Sign in
> Austrian ski-resort hotel