Re: A BrSc a?

On Thu, 25 Apr 2002 02:16:56 +0100, And Rosta <a-rosta@...> wrote:

....

>In purely phonological terms, that is fine. But to maximize
>orthographic brevity, you want to maximize the number of licit
>letter combinations: abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba, etc. Now
>clearly phonology can't cope with freely combinable segments,
>so either each letter would represent a single syllable, or
>else there should be an unwritten vowel. If each letter
>represents a single syllable, then you have only 26 syllables,
>which is way fewer than the number that even the most simple
>human phonology can comfortably cope with, so there is a
>needlessly severe loss of brevity.
>
>With brevity as the overriding goal, the best option would
>be the unwritten vowel one. Maybe something like this:
>
>aeiou = vowels
>bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz = consonants
>all syllables are CV
>a sixth vowel is unwritten
>a 22nd consonant (a glottal stop, say) is unwritten
>the unwritten vowel and unwritten consonant cannot occur
>  adjacent to each other (this would tend to mean that
>  there would be either no orthographic C-final words
>  or no orthographic V-initial words)
>
>The result makes every combination of letters licit and
>pronounceable. The phonotactics are an IAL-friendly CV
>pattern. There are (22 * 6) -1 = 131 syllables.
>
>--And.
I had similar ideas thinking about BrSc and Lin etc. More later unless the
rest is also redundant ...
Wouldn't possible sequences of unwritten V + unwritten C have to be taken
into account as well as the unwritten C + unwritten V syllable (that you
handled by subtracting 1 above)

Jeff J