From: Alex Ferguson (abf@cs.ucc.ie)
Date: Wed 25 Oct 2000 - 17:37:48 EEST
Peter Larsen:
Sorry. I must contain myself better.
> Alex Ferguson says many things about language,
> >Note that some systems spread "better" than others.
>
> I suspect that Western has an advantage here; I'm guessing its very
> regular.
Depends what you mean by regular. If Western were logographic or
> But Japanese writing is very conciously derived from Chinese. And
Heavily unmodified. Kanji makes brutally few concessions to the
syllabic, it'd be distinctly limited in this regard. If it were
a genuinely consistently phonetic alphabet, that's about the best
starting point. Then you only have to worry about sounds you don't
have letters for, phonic distinctions different languages do or do
not make, stress, tone, and all that stuff. (Western as IPA?)
> heavily modified to meet the needs of the language.
realities of Japanese as a language, for which it's much less well
suited than Chinese, in many respects. You may counter that this
means that there _are_ instances where a logographic script is used
where logic indicates that it ought not to be, but "borrowing" a
full-fledged script from a neighbour is a very different case than
actually _developing_ such a script, where local conditions don't
suit.
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