tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 25 19:36:36 2008
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Re: idea for writing system
Well, misconceptions like this are a good reason for my proposal.
Yes, they are. They just use archaic spelling, same as we do. Only, in the
case of Chinese, spelling is archaic by 4,000 years or more. Our spelling
is archaic by 600 years (the printing press).
What you hold is "common knowledge" and it is contradicted by science and
study.
Chinese: The Oracle Bone Script of the Shang Civilization reflects the
phonology of Old Chinese. About 90% of character blocks contain signs which
are purely phonetic in nature and can be explained in no other way. Shang
Oracle and Bronze scripts are the ancestor of all modern Chinese writing.
Logograms, right, are pictures of things that can be pictured. So that's
only those words of any given language written using a logo-phonetic or
syllabo-phonetic system. Numerals and such then comprise a small portion of
any writing system, even one with 600 glyphs. The majority of glyphs in
every last writing system represent either an abstract syllable (most
writing systems), a single phoneme, or (only in the case of Egyptian),
multiple quasi-syllabic combinations of 1-3 consonants.
Similarly, Sumerian only is recognized as a true writing system once it
employs the Ruebus Principle to re-use its logograms(word-glyphs) into
syllabograms (syllable-glyphs).
All writing systems, by their definition, function almost entirely on
phonetic principles. Even modern-day Chinese orthography reflects in many
ways the current pronunciation of words in Mandarin.
You see, apparently there's just no other way to do it. Making up a picture
or using picture combinations for intangible ideas or actions has never
yieled the results of the Rebus principle.
The Atlantean alphabet inspired my study of world writing systems. Please
see Omniglot.com and AncientScripts.com .
Jonathan Webley writes:
>> Lawrence John Rogers writes:
>> Well, all writing systems are phonetic.
>
> Except for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese, and some others (such as
> numerals - 10, 11, 12 are definitely not phonetic).
>
> Jon
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