mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (07/28/84)
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> Ogham has got to be the world's clumsiest alphabet,
No, writing which uses glyphs such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, modern
Japanese and Chinese ideograms are clumsier because a unique glyph must be
created for each new word or idea. Even Arabic and Hebraic scripts which do
not have vowels are clumsier. Ogham is phonetic and has vowels.
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Elegance and phonetic exactness are not the same concept. In fact, one
could easily make an argument that a precise phonetic script is a very
clumsy one for an inflecting language or especially a language in which
root forms shift their sounds.
Egyptian hieroglyphics were a particularly elegant form of script,
containing information about the meaning, the syllabification, the
sound, and even sometimes the importance of the words. It may have
been one of the easiest of all scripts to read at one time. Certainly
there is only one script that has lasted longer, the "clumsy" Chinese.
(See my book "The Psychology of Reading", Academic Press, 1983, for
further argument on this question).
Japanese is a fully phonetic syllabary (in fact, two syllabaries),
which is justified by the simplicity of the Japanese syllable system.
They do use a set of 2-3000 Chinese ideographs for many content words,
but this is for convenience, not necessity.
Chinese characters are formed according to various rules (and art), so
that the construction of new ones is not as arbitrary as one might at
first expect. At the height of scholastic influence, there were as many
as 40,000 of them, some quite monstrous, but most of these are now considered
archaic. You should be aware that many, if not most, Chinese "words"
consist of more than one character, so that the conceptual meanings of
the constituent characters reinforce or cross to make the whole word.
I don't know anything about Ogham, but if bonnie!jmm knows as much
about it as he does about the writing systems that are currently popular
in the world, I'd take his statements with a grain of salt.
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt