Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

Mark J. Reed scripsit:

> Anyway, I'm down to a syllable inventory size of only 864.
> Which seems low to me, but I guess it compares favorably to e.g.
> Japanese, which has less than 50 basic syllables according to the kana,
> and even allowing for the modifiers that turn fricatives
> into stops or prevent a consonantal sound change, has well
> under 100.
>
> Plus, it's still a little large for a fully syllabic writing system.
Not really.  The Yi syllabary has 819 characters to represent 1156
different syllables; the remaining 343 characters (the ones with mid-high
tone) are marked by adding a diacritic to the corresponding characters
with mid-high tone; high and low tone characters never appear with a mark.

--
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  jcowan@reutershealth.com
"'My young friend, if you do not now, immediately and instantly, pull
as hard as ever you can, it is my opinion that your acquaintance in the
large-pattern leather ulster' (and by this he meant the Crocodile) 'will
jerk you into yonder limpid stream before you can say Jack Robinson.'"
        --the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake