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

At 9:07 am -0400 29/5/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond Brown scripsit:
>
>> 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.
>
>Icelandic.
Of course.

The Old English Runic alphabet of 33 letters included two diphthongs, _éa_
and _eo_/_io_ as well as a bi-consonantal symbol for /st/.

[snip]
>
>The romanization of Zhuang (a Tai language of China) is interesting in
>this respect.  Standard Zhuang has six tones, which are written using
>special tonal letters.  AFAICT tone 1 has no special letter.
>Tone 2 is written with a reversed s, tone 3 with Cyrillic ZHE, tone 4
>with Cyrillic CHE, tone 5 with a sort of Gaelic-style G, and tone 6
>with a Cyrillic hard sign.  If you squint at these, they look like the
>digits 2-6 respectively.
So they do   :)

I seem to remember in Cyrillic attempts I used the old 'hard sign' for tone
1 (high level); then had the leading horizontal dipped down at the start so
that it looked like an accute joined to the top of lowercase Roman 'b'
(sans seriffe) for the high rising tone 2; with tone 4, the falling tone,
the line added to the top of the stem of 'b' was like a grave accent, but I
don't recall whether it went before the stem, as in tones 1 or 2, or
whether I put it after the stem for aesthetic resons; tone 3, the
falling-and-rising tone would almost certainly have used a mark like breve
co-joined the 'b' - but I forget the details.

It will be seen that essentially I came up with the same symbols as the
Pinyin diacritics (which are fairly obvious one to use, methinks), but
instead of using them as diacritics, they were combined the Cyrillic "soft
sign" to form 4 tone symbols.

But the details of the rest  are long lost.

But at any rate, your answers to my questions and your observations on
abjads and abugidas are helping to formulate my own ideas on BrSc
orthography - as indeed has some (tho, alas, not all) the discussions on
the 'Optimum number of symbols'.  I hope I'm not the only conlanger to have
been so helped.

Ray.

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