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--- In ceqli@yahoogroups.com, Rex May - Baloo <rmay@m...> wrote: > > Yes, I have to fight my impulse to dick around with the phonology. I'm > still hung up on letter names, tho, in a search for reduncancy. Suppose we > went with no pattern, but gave each letter a name: > --SNIP-- I had thought about patterns like that too, for my own languages. But why do we need redundancy (by which you're referring to audible clarity, yes?)? 1: If we're spelling out words...but Ceqli is phonetic so that shouldn't be necessary very often. 2: If we're spelling out initialisms...might be nice there, but there's context as well to help disambiguate. 3: If we're spelling out identification over a radio, like police and pilots do...but they've developed their own specialised alphabet that's designed for extreme clarity, more even than what you've suggested. And they've sacrificed brevity to do it. I lean toward an alphabet that's easy to memorize and doesn't take a big bite out of the desired morpheme namespace. Also, just as we expect listeners to be able to hear the difference between everyday words that differ by only a consonant, so too could we expect it when speaking the names of letters. And your 'zayn' idea works just fine to help out over a staticky phone line. > > All this wouldn't be necessary if we weren't using the 14 for pronouns. > Thoughs? I love using the letter names for anaphora. An appealing and effective idiosyncracy. --larry