Re: "Useful languages"

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

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