Re: "Useful languages"

Siyo!
You know the drill--see below:

--- Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2002 16:08:10 -0500, "Karapcik, Mike"
> <Karapcik@...> wrote:
>
> >| --- Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> >| > On Tue, 12 Feb 2002 22:54:14 +0100, Florian
> Rivoal
> >| > <florian.rivoal@...> wrote:
> >| >
> >| > hard to read). While few languages are as easy
> to
> >| > read as Finnish or Czech,
> >| > there can hardly be many languages with as many
> >| > pitfalls as English when it
> >| > comes to spelling.
> >
I guess
> Spanish would have been
> a better example after all, as Clint Jackson Baker
> suggested. Swahili and
> Turkish as well.
>
I would also add Cherokee to the list, at least in
theory.  The expectation in Cherokee is for you to
spell it the way it sounds, and if two people spell
something differently it's not a big deal because it
will be similar and mutually understood anyway.
Actually, when Sequoyah was first developping the
syllabary, he had over 250 symbols, because he was
trying to account for every sound in spoken Cherokee.
Then he realized he was accounting for dialectal
difference which wouldn't be necessary in the written
language and reduced the number considerably.  (BTW
people usually say that there are 88 symbols in the
Cherokee syllabary.  There are actually a few more for
variants--eg "na" vs. "hna".)

But, like I said, "in theory"... Like any language, it
has evolved beyond the written form, but it is
understandable--at this stage in the game Sequoyah is
a national hero (meaning the Cherokee nation) and
no-one would want to mess with his creation.  For
example, what was origianlly the sound /ts/ has split
into /ts/, /tS/, and /dZ/, yet they all use the /ts/
symbols.

Clint

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