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Re: Anth Assignment Conorthography

From:nicole perrin <nicole.eap@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 18, 2000, 17:25
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