John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
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,
....
> > The letters that make up a word are neither
phonetic nor ideographic.
> > They are abstract squiggles that fit together to
form longer abstract
> > squiggles.
...
> 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
> it will inevitably walk again.
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
I was thinking about the time I spent a couple of
semesters learning American Sign Language in night
school. Some of the signs and hand motions related
"ideographically" to something you could associate
with in your mind, but many of the hand signals seemed
completely arbitrary. And yet I found it
exceptionally easy to become fluent in sign language.
A few years later I designed a pretty extensive
ideographic language (around 2000 symbols as I recall)
and found it very easy to learn and remember the
symbols. Much easier than learning German vocabulary
had been in school.
I tend to think that when symbols are "almost"
phonetically related as in English spelling, it
creates a huge amount of confusion that makes it much
harder to learn. If a writing system is phonetically
pure and completely regular it will be easy to learn
BUT (in my experience at least) if a writing system is
not related to sounds in any way, but is strictly
visual, it will also be quite easy to learn. It is
only when it is kinda sorta almost phonetic with a
bazzilion exceptions and irregularities that it is
hard to learn.
That's my theory, and I'm sticking with it ;-)
--gary