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Re: made-to-order alphabets

From:Paul Bennett <paul.bennett@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 28, 1999, 8:02
dirk elzinga writes:
>>>>>>
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): <<<<<< In the same book, there's a short section on the Hanuno'o (o' = {o acute}, not {o} {stop}) language of the Philippines. There's no fixed (or even nearly fixed) character order in popular use, although there's a Western "scholarly" order which follows the Tagalog order (with {r} added before {l}). Literacy is somewhere near 70%, although there's no formal system of tuition. Teenagers teach each other on an ad-hoc basis, and 85% of the extant texts are Love Poetry. There's also no fixed line orientation (although characters within a text are oriented consistently). HTH --- Pb ************************************************************* This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been scanned for the presence of computer viruses. *************************************************************