tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 18 15:01:14 2004
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Re: canon pIqaD
- From: "QeS lagh" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: canon pIqaD
- Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 08:00:33 +1000
- Bcc:
jIghItlhpu':
>Recently I read an interesting study that claimed that English's system is
>almost logographic in practice, since spelling is so complex. It claimed
>that one can't accurately learn the symbols that make up a word; you really
>have to learn the entire word as a unit. English's spelling system is very
>difficult (there are 1,440 ways to write the 40-some phonemes of English);
>I have heard it said that only pre-reform Irish Gaelic is more difficult to
>spell.
jangpu' SuStel:
>This has a point, but it's mostly hyperbole. English spelling gives a very
>good approximation of what is pronounced, and changing something's spelling
>may give someone a reason to pronounce a word differently. There ARE
>systems; they're just sometimes arbitrary.
It's true that there are systems to English, but there are a heck of a lot
of them, and they don't work all of the time. For instance, there are plenty
of common exceptions to the rule "I before E, except after C": "codeine" and
"neither" are two. Often the approximations are pretty rough. I've got one
word for you: "ghoti". {{:)
But you're right, the majority of letters (and letter groups) are pronounced
the same as they're written. "b", for instance, is very rarely pronounced as
anything but [b]. It's just that there are an awful lot of exceptions to the
rules in English spelling, and there are a lot of words that need to be
learned outside those rules. I'd be surprised if Klingon's writing system
were as complex.
>Anyway, there's no reason why a language's writing system has to be ALL
>logographic or ALL alphabetic or ALL syllagraphic or ALL anything else.
>Including Klingon.
I'm not sure that there's a completely pure system anywhere in the world.
Any language that uses the digits 0 to 9 in writing is partly ideographic,
after all. I'd be a bit disappointed if pIqaD DID turn out to be a pure
system; where's the fun in that? :)
QeS lagh
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