From: Alex Ferguson (abf@cs.ucc.ie)
Date: Mon 17 Jul 2000 - 03:33:05 EEST
Henrix:
> Are you saying that the Western script would be an alphabetical script where
> the characters do not represent building blocks for sound??
Where they represent them to a greater or lesser degree. I've already
cited the examples of Hebrew and English, neither or which are
what one might call 'phonetic'. Given that all the Western languages
are significantly related, I'd say it need not be much 'worse'.
Firstly, as far as the meaning of the word is concerned, this
hardly matters at all. But as for the sound: some sample cases
of where an alphabetic scripts can be non-phonetic are 'interpolated'
sounds (like Hebrew vowels), silent letters (let's nominate Irish,
before David D. does it for us), letters with different sounds
(different between languages with the same script; or by context;
or seemingly in ad hoc fashion), and groups of letters which form
a single phomeme (English is a grave offender in all of these).
I've doubtless omitted one or two crimes against orthography
perpetrated by merciless humanity over the millennia...
> What would they represent in that case? They would have to represent
something,
> atoms of a word, you can actually use to construct words with.
That's somewhat like saying, what do the individual strokes of a logogram
'represent', to take an admittedly extreme case. As far as meaning
is concerned, only the whole word really matters.
> Sign languages for deaf persons (a ideographic language in a very short-lived
> medium) does indeed have alphabetical signs that (for the deaf) do not
> represent sounds, but written characters. But their meaning is derived from
our
> normal spoken languages, so in a way they represent sound anyhow.
i.e., it's not a pure 'ideographic' language at all, it's a 'mixed
script' language. c.f. Japanese, Rebus-scripts, etc. Besides, in
this case that's the language itself, not an add-on script.
But it's true that to convey 'foreign words', names, etc, it does
require an alphabetic sub-language (sub-script?). For similar
reasons, as I keep trying to point out, a pure logographic
Western is basically impossible. Chinese really is exceptional in
several respects, which is why it's just about the only language left
which is. (And for quite some time, not just the last century or three.)
Cheers,
Alex.
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