Re: An Alphagraphic Language

Gary Shannon scripsit:

> What I propose is an alphabet of letters designed not to represent
> sounds, but designed to be as visually distinctive as possible, and
> designed to fit together side by side on a line so as to make graphical
> word forms that are as easy as possible to distinguish from one another.
> The letters that make up a word are neither phonetic nor ideographic.
> They are abstract squiggles that fit together to form longer abstract
> squiggles.  These abstract squiggles are assigned arbitrarily to words,
> just like we assign the 'f' sound to 'gh' in "enough" and think nothing
> of it.
Well, actually we have to work pretty hard to learn our irregular spelling:
it takes anglophones on average twice as long to learn to read as those
who speak more sensibly written languages.  While I think your idea is
amazing, it's absolutely not naturalistic (which may or may not be a
problem).  No known writing system is absolutely independent of both
pictures and pronunciation, and very few of them, if any, depend on
pictures alone.

I think this system puts such a burden on the learner that reading and
writing would be the tools of a privileged class only, and even they
would find the system a great pain to learn and use.

--
Where the wombat has walked,            John Cowan <jcowan@...>
it will inevitably walk again.          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

Reply