From: Alex Ferguson (abf@cs.ucc.ie)
Date: Fri 14 Jul 2000 - 05:04:58 EEST
Bugger, thought I'd sent this way-too-late _last_ night. Well,
3am tonight will have to do... (Unless I'm now just repating
myself.)
Andrew Barton replieth:
> > If I can pronouce something in one vernacular language, have it
> written down in Latin, and have it read elsewhere in a different
> one, then that's a common written form by any reasonable duck
> test.
> Err, that's called translation, surely? A very different thing from
> totally different spoken languages, such as the different
> languages of China, being written with the same ideographs.
The point at which they differ is one of degree, not kind.
Cognitively, reading works by seeing a squiggle on a page, and
'pattern-matching' against a (vocalisable) word. The main
functional difference between alphabetic scripts and logographic
ones is that in the latter case, there may or may not be some
more-or-less phonetic reading of a (written) word, which is
important when you're learning a language, and when you encounter
a 'new' word. But it's not infeasible by any means to have
an alphabetic script for a language which is bizarrely un-phonetic
(nominations on a postcard...), which could quite easily be
the 'Western' situation. (How closely it resembles the historical
case of Latin I shall leave for people who can bluff their way
better on such matters better than I.)
> When Dante set out to write a great poem in Italian, he didn't
> have to do anything new to be able to write it down in the Roman
> alphabet.
Other than the small matter of devising Italian orthography from
scratch? (Actually, I have no idea whether _he_ did this or not...)
Cheers,
Alex.
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