Re: What is an alphabet? Re: Optimum number of symbols

At 12:05 pm -0400 28/5/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond Brown scripsit:
[snip]
>> I think it's because my copy divides the symbols up into 'consonants',
>> 'terminals', and 'compound terminals' which has misled me.
>
>It sounds like your "compound terminals" are bopomofo digraphs
>such as "u an" which in Pinyin is wan/uan.
That is probably so.

>> But even among the plain 'terminals' some denote sounds ending in /n/ and
>> /N/, and the two diphthongs written "ao" and "ai" in Pinyin are included.
>
>Indeed, though writing a diphthong or even a di-consonant with one letter
>is scarcely unknown in admittedly alphabetic scripts (consider English
>"i" and "x").
{x} was always a bi-consonant in Latin; oddly the most archaic Greek
alphabets had no bi-consonants, the western version only later adding a
symbols for /ks/, and the eastern versions have single symbols for both
/ks/ and /ps/.  Tho, compared with the Phoenician abjad and the archaic
Greek alphabets, these bi-consonant symbols were innovations,I'm not
persuaded they were improvements.

English, of course, is notorious for using single vowel symbols with
diphthongal values (unlike French which does the opposite: three symbols
{eau} for a single vowel [o]).  I believe other instances of single letters
with diphthongal value do occur outside of English, but none come to mind
immediately, unless one counts the [ja] & [ju] of Cyrillic.

>As I said before, "ang" and "eng" represent nasalized
>vowels which have /aN/ and /@N/ as allophones, leaving only the letters
>"an" and "en" /@n/ as true VC letters.
OK.

[snip]
>
>> 2. the notion that alphabetic scripts are approximately 'one character =
>> one phoneme' (but that may be the result of recent threads).
>
>I would say that alphabets attach equal weight to consonants and vowels,
>representing them both with full letters (not marks, signs, or diacritics).
Yes, thanks.

I knew you would cut through theoretic garbage and get to the nub of the
matter   :)

I should've been thinking of the good ol' vowels and consonants of my
schooldays, and not be distracted by phonemes.  The simplest explanation
are often the best.

>> >This point may be contrasted with the use of "yi" and "wu" in Pinyin to
>> >write monomorphemic /i/ and /u/.
>>
>> If indeed they are monomorphemic.
>
>Of course I should have said mono*phon*emic.
OOps - and I hadn't noticed that what you actually wrote had been
'monomorphemic'!   I had read it as "monophonemic" and, thus, read my reply
the same way.

I guess there's a fancy term describing what I did.  To me it shows I
really do need the week's break that we're getting in the first week of
June before I crack up completely   ;)

[snip]

>Bopomofo is certainly not quite one-phoneme-one-character,
But then, as I've said elswhere, I don't think any natlangs quite
one-phoneme-one-character until some such alphabets were devised during the
last century.

>but it's not that far from the idea,
>and there is no special emphasis on consonants or de-emphasis of
>vowels.
Yep - both get equal treatment and, I guess, it represents the consonant
and vowel sounds as intuitively perceived by its speakers.

>Tones, OTOH, are represented by diacritics, as in most
>alphabets.
Yet the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system incorporated tones into the spelling which
IMO was "a good thing" - tho I admit the way it was done in GR was somewhat
kludgey.

I know it's not the fault of Pinyin but of lazy anglophone editors, but I
find it frustrating when I come ascross a Chinese name (wheher place name
or personal name) in a newspaper, journal or book and I still don't know
how to say the name properly because the tone symbols ain't there!

I once played around with using Cyrillic letters for Chinese and using the
'hard' and 'soft' signs (and inventing two more similar ones) to denotes
tones.  I put the tone symbols between the initial consonant and the rhyme
(I don't remember exactly what happened to syllables with no initial
consonant).

But, perhaps, we'd better not get into a "How to alphabetize Mandarin
thread" since whatever conlangers suggest is not relevant.  The people who
will determine how Mandarin is being written at the end of 21st century are
the Chinese themselves.  But if a conlang should happen to have tones like
Mandarin........    :-)

Ray.

=======================================================
Speech is _poiesis_ and human linguistic articulation
is centrally creative.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
=======================================================

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