Re: The write direction (was: Interesting Brain/Language Nugget of Info)

Raymond Brown writes:

>Elsewhere in the same book (Language and Symbolic Systems), he says:
>"I often speculate whether an ideal writing system would not be some golden
>mean between the unwieldy thousands of arbitrary units and the paltry few
>letters of the Latin alphabet.  To make a wild guess at the optimum number
>of symbols, if we take say the geometric mean between the number of letters
>of the Latin alphabet and the number of one of the sets of basic characters
>of 1000 or 1100, it will come out to a list of roughly 170 symbols, which
>seems to be a list of manageable size."
>
     I'm currently at the very beginning of a project in Ricadh for a list
of 216 ideographic characters, which I myself thought was exactly the
perfect amount.  Nice to see somebody else had the same idea.  :)

>The Korean is still, I think, my favorite.
     Mine too.  An odd thing:  I found myself with an excuse to learn hangul
recently, in preparation for my own trip to Korea last winter.  I found a
lot of its previous "attraction" was taken away by the fact that I know it
now.  Somehow, something was lost between the "pretty pictures" and
"elements with meaning" stages.  Anybody else had that happen when they
learned any other natscripts?

     -- Chris


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