Re: Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?

On Thursday, May 27, 2004, at 09:59 AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:

> Staving Ray Brown:
>> On Wednesday, May 26, 2004, at 09:50 AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:
[snip]

>>> I've got an idea for a six-case system
>>> Sentence-initial
>>> Word-initial
>>> Medial
>>> Word-final
>>> Sentence-final
>>> Proper Names.
>>
>> Yikes - no paragraph-initial and no paragraph-final cases!! You'll have
>> to
>> use white space!
>>
>> Yep - what gain is there in this except that you'll be able to write
>> whole
>> paragraphs without white spaces? But IMO it's main effect will be to
>> increase the burden on learners of the language (and possibly make
>> reading
>> more difficult).
>
> The purpose is to make the writing system as cursive as possible. It's
> written boustrophedon on wax tablets with a stylus, and one only lifts the
> stylus from the tablet at the end of the paragraph.
Right - so we're really talking about positional variants as in the
cursive Arabic writing, rather than upper-case ~ lower-case systems (whose
rules of usage differ arbitrarily from language to language).

> It's intended for yagh
> tyalpy tyubvul, an isolating language.
Right - so not meant to be a sort of general purpose writing system, but
rather for a specific language - fair enough.

> I do not inflict my writing systems
> with such auxlangy design criteria as ease of learning!
I don't think ease of learning as regards writing and orthography is
particularly auxlangish; it's surely just common sense. Most (all?) of the
writing systems devised in the last two or three centuries for different
natlangs do just that. Where we have complicated systems like English,
French, Japanese etc. it's for historic reasons. If these languages were
newly discovered and had not be committed to writing, there can surely be
little doubt they'd be given a phonemic script.

If one endows a conlang with a complicated or irregular (and I'm _not_
suggesting that yours is irregular) then it seems to me there should be a
conhistory for the script.

Ray
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