Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004 jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM wrote:

> Gary Shannon scripsit:
>
> > That's raises the question, just how large would a
> > syllabary have to be to semi-accurately represent all
> > existing English words?
>
> About 10,000 characters.  While this is nowhere near as large as the
> Han script, with more than 70,000 characters in Unicode already and
> more to be added later, it is much larger than any known syllabary
> (Ethiopic has 345, Unified Canadian has 630), and much larger than the
> 4,000-odd characters that most literate Han-speakers actually know.
> My guess is that it is too large to be practical.
>
> > Is there such a thing as a vowel-first syllabary?
> > Some preliminary dinking around seems to show that
> > vowel-first symbols (like "ak" and "or" instead of
> > "ka" and "ro") might work better for English.
>
> http://www.daimi.au.dk/~bek/thesis_html/node34.html suggests using
> a scheme in which each character encodes either an initial consonant
> (cluster) plus the (first half of a) vowel, or else the (second half of a
> vowel plus the) final consonant (cluster).  This would require about 2000
> characters, within the tolerable limit.  Bopomofo is something like this.
More for rhotic Englishes, unless non-pre-vocalic /r/ is actually a vowel
(/member of a diphthong) in them (I've heard of such analyses for American
but not heard of the legitimatisation, but I doubt these would hold for
frex Scottish). My next questions are: Why the duplication (e.g. /t/ and
/tj/ are listed as onsets twice), the gaps, and, more importantly, in what
wold is -dst or -kss, -nds, -mpts used? And it makes no mention of /T/,
/S/, /Z/, /dZ/, /tS/. I suspect some of that's an improper conversion from
LaTeX and so at least some of the dupilicants are supposed to be different
sounds, but I've still got no idea what -kss could be.

--
Tristan