Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

Mark J. Reed sikyal:

> 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.
Have you considered simply not having unique symbols for all possible
syllables? AFAIK this is fairly common in syllabaries: some distinctions
are neutralized in writing, making reading somewhat of an adventure.
Alternately, you could have a smaller set of basic symbols with diacritics
for indicating a few of the distinctions.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

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