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--- In engelang@y..., "And Rosta" <a-rosta@a...> wrote: > Mike: > > On Sun, 26 May 2002 19:59:01 +0100, And Rosta <a-rosta@A...> wrote: > > >However, imagine a consonant inventory where for every place of > > >articulation you have voiceless fricative, voiced fricative, > > >nasal, breathy voiced stop, aspirated stop, unaspirated voiceless > > >stop, plain voiced stop, ejective, and each of these can be > > >palatalized. For each place of artic, that gives 8 * 2 = 16 > > >phonemes. I would find a featural script far more satisfactory > > >a written representation of such a language. That is, a > > >script based on primitives for place, manner and palatalization > > >would be more satisfactory than one with primitives for each > > >phoneme, not because of sheer number of primitives but rather > > >because the one better captures the underlying system to the > > >phonology. > > > > Hmm. Assuming 3 places this means 48 phonemes. Assuming 4, 64. > > Yes. > > > I wrote a few paragraphs as to the script given such a phonology, > > but I think it would make more sense to make sure I understand > > your position before posting them. > > > > I guess the question that comes to my mind is, simply, why do you > > feel it is important that the orthography capture the underlying > > phonological system? In what way exactly would such a system > > be more satisfactory? > > I can't think of a really good answer, which is why I've been > mulling it over for a few days. Two reasons I can think of, though > perhaps more lurk in my unconscious, are that such a writing > system would include less arbitrariness and that it would be > simpler, in that if it is a mere reflection of the phonology > it would involve fewer rules specific to the orthography. I > suppose that a further reason is that we have a general > predilection for the structure of wholes to transparently reflect > their constitution (so that e.g. a base-10 conlang would > prefer the number 12 to based on ten (or one) and two, rather > than be something opaque like 'twelve' or 'dozen'). > > --And. Well I think you have in mind approximately the same two benefits I did. The first is easing the design of fonts for various printing systems and so forth: computers, typesetting, etc. The other is pure conceptual elegance, which is what I think you allude to at the end of your paragraph. Here's what I had originally wrote: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (BTW, although I gather this phonology is posited for hypothesis, I just thought I'd mention that this would be a highly unusual phoneme inventory not only in the sense of having a large number of manners of articulation but also in its exceptional regularity. For example, I'm guessing it's common to offset place of art. between stops and fricatives and I speculate this is to maximize onstrastiveness. It seems natural to have a few gaps here and there, but I am sure many can cite phoneme inventories that contradict this.) If such a system did exist I can see no reason not to create a featural script like you propose. In fact, there are a couple of immediate benefits to this approach, but IMO mainly from a conceptual and a graphical design sense. In the conceptual sense it is certainly more elegant to tailor a highly regular orthography for a highly regular phonology. Graphically, it might well be easier to design the computer fonts and so forth if you were dealing with a smaller number of composeable base characters and features. In terms of learnability certainly it would a substantially easier to learn for those trained in phonology, who could probably memorize the meanings of the symbols within a few minutes instead of hours, but the improvement would be essentially negligible, IMHO, for those not so trained, particularly children. I am not sure what other benefits there would be, but at least in these specific ways it's more satisfactory than an ordinary alphabet. I don't think *functionally* there is much of an improvement. By 'functionally', I mean performing the primary purpose of a script, namely representing speech. As far as the status of the script, insofar as groups of scriptemes can be analyzed as corresponding to segments, this would seem to me to be an unusually regularized and featural alphabet which has been tailored to an unusual language--an exaggerated version of Hangul really. But given the fuzziness of the terms I suppose it could be argued to be something new. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I have in the works an essay which explains my root motivations for believing what I said regarding the unlikelihood of features making a script substantially more learnable. My essay seems to be turning out to be more entertaining than edifying perhaps, but I hope that it will be worth the group's curiosity. Regards