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Re: "Useful languages"

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Thursday, February 14, 2002, 10:17
En réponse à Danny Wier <dawier@...>:

> > And I guess Chinese and Japanese (in the case of Kanji), and older > Korean > (Hanja) could be included, for what it's worth.... >
Personnally, I would definitely include Tibetan in the list of languages with a strange orthography. Like French or English, the Tibetan orthography (using a syllabic alphabet derived from the Devanagari, to make things easier :)) ) describes quite accurately an earlier state of the language, but the sound changes have put the spoken language far away from the written language, and the written language has never been updated. The problem, IIRC, is that Spoken Tibetan is much farther from its written equivalent than French or English are! But I don't know much about it so I cannot add more. Boudewijn knows about that. Can you give us a review? I am especially interested in knowing how Tibetan marks tones... Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.