From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jun 29 2005 - 16:56:27 CDT
On 6/29/05, Eric Muller <emuller@adobe.com> wrote:
> Yes, the question is "when a writing system is viewed as a mechanism to
> record sounds, how good a job does it do?", where "good" is to be
> defined. I chose "economy", because arguably a writing system that has
> 10 symbols or symbol combinations for the same sound is not "as good" as
> one that has only 1.
You write like you assume that every writing system should be some
form of alphabet. Why should sounds corresponding to writing be a good
thing? In many ways for English, it wouldn't be good if our writing
had a one-to-one correspondance between letters and sounds, since then
I would have to try and understand British and Indian accents in
writing as well as speech. Is it better for Cherokee to be written
with 84 letters or 21 letters that need twice as much space? (Or with
all the accents and stuff that linguists transcribe Cherokee and
ordinary writers go without?) You're begging the question.
> IPA, as least when restricted to the set of symbols used for the writing
> of a given language, is presumably both an economic (there is a single
> sign for a given sound) and accurate writing system for that language.
> Hence the idea of measuring by comparing to IPA
The words economic and accurate are misleading. IPA is not maximally
economic in the number of symbols it uses--digraphs have fewer
symbols, and represent the sound as unambigiously. By many other
standards of economic, like the number of characters it takes to write
something, the IPA is less than economic.
The important, IMO, standards of economic relate to how fast can it be
written, how fast can it be entered into a computer, how fast can
printed material be written, and how fast can written material be
read. The IPA is not a winner on several of those, as several symbols
are similar and hard to write distinctly and clearly distinguish on
reading.
If you judge accurate by the exact representation of sounds by
letters, IPA will be more accurate, but IPA is not more accurate in
representing the history of the word, nor is it more accurate in
representing a hypothetical compromise between competing dialects, nor
is it more accurate in representing the underlying forms that
underwent phonetic changes when prefixs and postfixes and what not
were added.
I don't see any point of measuring by the IPA; it's fairly obvious
from the basic knowledge of a script, and I don't think tells us very
much at all about how good a script is, especially as the mapping from
glyphs to (completely abstract) characters is as much an important
part of the script as the mapping from characters to sounds.
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