tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 27 22:04:59 2008

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Re: idea for writing system

Lawrence John Rogers ([email protected])



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. 








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