made-to-order alphabets

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Adam Parrish wrote:
> >         Quick question on ordering schemes for alphabets: is it
> > necessary to have one? For some reason it strikes me that the Talin (the
> > writing system for Doraya) doesn't really have any particular "order,"
> > and that the thought of sequencing them would seem odd to the speakers
> > of Doraya.  Is it a required thing for alphabetic systems to have a
> > perceived "order"?  Does something similar happen in other writing
> > systems (e.g., syllabaries)?
>
> Well, many times, when a writing system is ordered, it's just a
> conventional order, a mnemonic aid, and it's not used for ordering.  I
> don't know if all systems have one conventional order, there might be
> some alphabets/syllabries with variable order.
>
> As for syllabries, an example is Japanese, which orders the kana by
> consonant and vowel, so that, for instance, vowel-only ones are first, a
> i u e o, then ka ki ku ke ko, then s-, t-, n-, h-, m-, y-, r-, w-, and
> syllabic n.
In Bright and Daniels _The World's Writing Systems_ there is mention
made of a poem, attibuted to the Buddhist monk Kuukai, which uses each
character of hiragana exactly once. It runs (in English
transliteration):

Iro wa nioedo chirinuru wo waga yo tare zo tsune naran ui no okuyama
kyoo koete asaki yume miji ei mo sezu

"The colorful [flowers] are fragrant, but they must fall. Who in this
world can live forever? Today corss over the deep mountains of life's
illusions and there will be no more shallow dreaming, no more
drunkenness." (Bright and Daniels, p250)

I've always thought that this was "way cool", and should by all means be
emulated; not only should the characters in a writing system be arranged
in a mnemonically advantageous way, but the arrangement ought to mean
something!

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir