Re: Anth Assignment Conorthography

Barry Garcia wrote:

> Hmm, this goes out to those on the list who know (anyone) but:
>
> I was wondering, would a system like Chinese Hanzi work for highly
> inflected languages? I know the Japanese had problems with it, which is
> why katakana and hiragana were invented. Or is it just a matter of
> creating affixes for the particles/affixes/etc. that would solve the
> problems?
Not that I really know, but, it seems to me that a system like that
would work much more simply with an agglutinating language than with an
inflecting one, because an agglutinating language would (usually) have
fewer suffixes, you just stick them on one after another.  An inflecting
language, on the other hand, would have way more suffixes (or prefixes),
you know?  But it's really only a matter of inventing characters for
however many particles you have, at least as far as I can see, so the
only benefit for an agglutinating system over an inflecting one is that
there'd probably be fewer characters to make up.  Am I missing something
big here?

Nicole