Re: An Alphagraphic Language

At 07:48 30.3.2004 -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:
>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.
You may be right, but no strictly visual writing system
is going to suffice with a few dozen signs, so for
practical (not least typing/encoding) purposes
phonemic writing comes out on top.

At 16:00 30.3.2004 -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:

>I thought perhaps inflections would be handled by
>various swishes, swashes and do-dads attached to or
>appended to the word.  "written" might be "write" with
>a certain curly flourish following the word, while
>"writing" could be the same symbol again, but with a
>different inflecting decoration attached to it.
This is actually how shorthand works -- at least the
type I use -- since frequently recurring morphemes,
which typically are inflection or derivation affixes
have their own one-stroke abbreviations or even
primitive strokes all their own.  Thus the Swedish
weak preterite morpheme -de/-te corresponding to
English -ed has its own primitive stroke(*) and
so do the morphemes corresponding to English
-ness, -ing and -er, while the very frequent
-tion/-sion ending is abbreviated to an easily
identifiable loop that otherwise stands for /sn/.
The combinations of plural and definiteness markers
also have their distinct strokes, which speeds up
writing a lot (tho these particular strokes are
interpretable as the unabbreviated form of these
morpheme combinations with small loops for /n/ and
/r/ omitted.

Granted every non-phonemic spelling is a burden on
memory, but once integrated it is no burden on speed,
which is what shorthand is all about.  In terms of
paper expense and graphical 'length' my shorthand
writing is clearly 'longer' than my 'longhand', but
it is a hell of a lot faster to write, and at least
no slower to read.

(*) Unincidentally the same sign as is used for the
suffix -de is also used for the prefix be-, since no
confusion can arise.  When I write English with "my"
Swedish shorthand system this primitive sign comes
in handy for the "th" sounds - but this means that
I have to write be- 'literally', which actually is
a nuisance in "become" and "because", so I write
those as "thcome" and "thk" without confusion
("come" having its own modified primitive).

/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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