Re: made-to-order alphabets

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





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