tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 25 20:17:34 2008
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: idea for writing system
What you-all mean by "phonemic", right, isn't how scientists call it.
Scientists would say something like "each phoneme corresponding to a single
sign". For alphabets or syllabaries, the rule that everyone ends up
following is this: whenever your language standardized that syllabary or
alphabet, that's when the spelling got fixed in its place. Even
non-alpha-syllabic writing systems work this way. People like the old
spelling because it makes reading old stuff easier and stuff like that.
So here's the explaination:
French is from Latin, which was first written about 700 BC. So they retain
not only super-old spellings from Latin but mostly Old French stuff that
really doesn't relate much to Modern French. But that's how writing systems
work.
English got its stuff together with Caxton and the English printing press
and the standardization of spelling therefore. That's like 1400. So we use
Middle English spellings with a few variations. That's why we have spelling
bees.
Korean uses (mostly and increasingly) the alphabet invented by King Sejong
about 1440. However, it wasn't popularly used until 1945. (And know that
EVERYONE claims their writing systems is this "phonemic", even the Spanish.)
So I suspect that you're right, their ortho-graphy (correct or standard
writing) dates back to 1945 and so reflects the modern language pretty good,
but probably not exactly and for all dialects.
Certain African (and I know Africa always gets a bad rap by Westerners)
languages have been written down even more recently and correspond even
better than Korean to their Modern Language.
But give them all 1000, 2000 years. The way things go, you may be
surprised, spelling for English will be far, far more goofy in 1000 years,
(if a written English is used at all by non-specialists).
http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_timeline.html
Benjamin Barrett writes:
> Korean is phonemic. A few languages such as French and English deviate
> quite radically from their intended phonetic writing systems. BB
>
> On Jul 25, 2008, at 12:47 PM, Jonathan Webley wrote:
>
>>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
Canidate for Linguistics B.A. at
Michigan State University
404 E. Owen Hall
East Lansing, MI 48825
Cell:1-906-370-3624