[84905] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: idea for writing system
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lawrence John Rogers)
Mon Jul 28 01:05:17 2008
In-Reply-To: <000b01c8f04a$d7ddc2a0$0800a8c0@juH.Seruqtuq.net>
From: "Lawrence John Rogers" <roger158@msu.edu>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:04:17 -0400
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
This might be the reason why Sumerian and Sumerian-based Cuneiform
syllabaries seem to gravitate toward just that solution. Maybe there's
always some morphological or phonological alteration which occurs and
renders the idea of single ideogram cumbersome. I need more reading
suddenly...
The other idea is that maybe human minds don't readily analyze their own
languages (polysynthetic, agglutinative, or fusional, something bound
morpheme heavy) in terms of these suffixes. Maybe it's just part of the
whole "language is a subconcious thing". And so spelling it out is just the
only solution, especially for non-tangible concepts like grammatical
markers.
Then are Klingons smarter than humans (objectively, not subjectively)? And
if so, would that make their language understanding more or less a conscious
process (outside linguist-like professionals)? My lack of verbage betrays
my green training.
Also, there's this match-up, right, between writing systems and languages:
when you're constructing them, there's always elements of a real one which
prove cumbersome (like irregular verbs or writing systems that omit vowels
or digeminated (repeated) consonants). How real do you want to make it?
For a (logo-phonetic especially) writing system, the issues seem to be
either in terms of redundancy or omission. I mean, really, if we had signs
for all 11 or so vowels in English, wouldn't that be a pain to handle? It's
that sort of thing. It's never like IPA transcription or phonetic/phonology
inquiry transcription.
