Re: Thoughts on Word building

Hi!

Herman Miller <hmiller@...> writes:
> Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > ... I've seen a Wiki somewhere where a project of this kind is started. ...
Found it.  It was in FrathWiki:

http://wiki.frath.net/Hangraphy

Still very small, though.  But it's a Wiki!

>...  Words like "quick", "brown", and "fox" work out without much
>trouble. "Jumps" requires an inflection, but the character for
>initial s- can be adapted as a plural suffix. ...
Actually, my idea was to write inflections conceptually in German, not
by pronunciation.  Alternatively, I though about having a hybrid
system for mixed phonological and morphological writing.  In the first
for, there'd be a special character for 'plural'.  So with only this
information, you'd need to know the grammar to read it out, but could
understand it without needing the precise forms.  Would be a bit like
reading interlinears. :-) When writing the root semantics
conceptually, I wanted to write the grammar conceptually, too.  This
is how Chinese handles it's affixes, too (often with pronunciation
hints, of course, just as with all other characters).

>..  I've found that learning to read Japanese words can in some cases
>make them easier to remember, ...
Yes, but in reading, they become more than uncommon strings of
phonemes.

> ... For actually learning to read the words, I've had better luck
> learning each word as a unit, rather than learning individual
> characters and then learning how the characters are combined to form
> words. ...
Hmm, I think my Chinese is not good enough to make a judgement about
this.  Recognition of strings works just as well (or bad...) as
recognition of single characters.

**Henrik

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