Someone told you to describe something in your own words, and you’re taking it to the next step, aren’t you?
“Prolly”?
The Shaw Phonetic Alphabet, like Unifon, uses 40:
I don’t think there’s a single unequivocal answer. Henry Higgins, in Shaw’s play Pygmalion, certainly seems to suggest that there are many more sounds than a mere 40 characters would describe – and Shaw, of course, invented the Shavian alphabet. But you don’t want your alphabet to get too long and character-intensive. People have to learn and remember the damned thing, and extra letters are going to add significantly to reproduction and printing costs (especially in a pre-inkjet world)
Really? Surely having more letters available means you don’t have to use so many characters - e.g. instead of “sh” you could use the single character ʃ, and so on. Think of the Cyrillic character Щ, which requires four characters to transcribe in English (shch), and seven in German (schtsch).
Sure, you’d have to spend a bit more at the outset on casting more type, but in the long run you’d save lots of paper and ink.
It’s not just that — you’d have to have lots more characters set in metal, and lots more drawers to hold them (an awful lot more if you have different sizes and typefaces). And it will cause much more complication when you go to keyboards and the like.
Just revisit the questions, posted here many times, about how the Chinese managed with their movable type and keyboards.
What about letters with various accent marks and other adornments? If you used, say, an unadorned a, an a with an umlaut, an a with a circumflex, etc. to represent the various English sounds represented by a, would that count as one letter or several?
Depends on the language. In French, é and e are just variants of e. In Esperanto, ĝ and g are two completely-different letters.
So we’d have to make a decision.
You’re kidding, right? Those have been obsolete for decades. The International Phonetic Alphabet has what you need.
That is always a problem. If a word can be pronounced several different ways, then it can be written several different ways. All those sounds will correspond to the same word.
I’m not looking for the smallest working language with the least letters, I want to devise an alphabet that can cover all the sounds used in any possible language, with one letter per sound.
In my scheme, that would count as several, if they are pronounced differently.
I took a look at the IPA, but if I follow my last rule, I would have to know how many different sounds the IPA can represent. That would be the number of letters in my alphabet. It’s not clear to me, from looking at the IPA chart, how many different symbols (plus combinations of more than one symbol, used to represent a single “sound”) are used in the IPA.
Then you have a harder task than real linguists, who limit themselves to the phonology that’s actually used in human languages. To do what you’re proposing, you’ll need to do a comprehensive study of the entire human vocal apparatus, from the diaphragm to the nasal sinuses, and figure out every possible sound it can make.
I suspect a strong plurality of the sounds you discover (or derive from the principles of resonance, vibration, and airflow) would be alien to every human language; assigning letters to them would be eccentric, to say the least, and would increase the number of distinct glyphs required* to the point where you’ll have trouble getting anyone to draw a comprehensive font.
*(This assumes you insist on each distinct letter being implemented as a distinct glyph. You could have an inventory of base glyphs and an inventory of diacritical marks and rely on software to combine the two into finished glyphs. This is actually a workable solution, though the result is rarely ‘letter-quality’, as it were.)
Let’s change it to this then:
I’m not looking for the smallest working language with the least letters, I want to devise an alphabet that can cover all the sounds used in currently existing languages, with one letter per sound.
The number of glyphs you use all depends on what type of writing system you want to churn out.
You gots your standard Alphabet where each letter (grapheme/character/glyph/etc) corresponds, roughly, to a phoneme which are joined to create words. Most of Europe uses this system due to the Greeks and their ca-rayz system of writing. ~20-30 characters are normal.
An example: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Then you gots your Abjad. It’s basically the same **Alphabet **model, but you knock out all the vowels to make things more interesting. t’s knd fckd p sstm bt sm ppl lk t tht wy. See? A little more difficult then your standard alphabet since the full words are merely an image of how it sounds; vowel intensive languages (like Native Hawaiian) would be rendered as garbage. Arabic uses this one; ~20-30 characters are normal too.
An example: bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxz
Then things get… different. Your standard Abugida is basically the Abjad writing system (without any vowels), but you take each consonant (~20-30) and create a corresponding character for each possible vowel. So take the number of consonants (20) and multiply that with the number of vowels (6) and you get ~120 characters. Devanagari (Hindi) uses this with ~1296 viable symbols.
An example:
ba be bi bo bu by
ca ce ci co cu cy
da de di do du dy
…
Your standard **syllabary ** is basically the same as your standard Abugida model where each written symbol represents a syllable, but there is no consonant/vowel multiplication goin’ on. So it’s much smaller then an Abugida, but it still needs to have a large bank of syllables to use and combine together so it will be larger than an Alphabet. ~40-90 is a good average number and Japanese Hiragana is an example of this.
Finally you gots yer **logographs **where each written symbol represents not a sound (Phoneme), but an idea (wetness, brightness, etc). Good examples are some hieroglyphs and Chinese. ~1000-the sky’s the limit man…
And of course, there’s variation within any of those categories, too. For instance, among the logographs, there’s variation in how representational the symbols are. Egyptian hieroglyphs are mostly little pictures of things, and often pictures of the specific things they represent, but Chinese characters, while they might have started out that way, have become stylized to unrecognizability in most cases. Plus, among the phonetic writing systems, there’s the question of the shape of the symbols and how they’re organized: In the Latin alphabet, for instance, f and v look completely different and are nowhere near each other in alphabetical order, despite having very similar sounds.
This is what I want: an Alphabet.
I don’t care if similar sounds have similar-looking letters, and/or if the letters are next to each other in the alphabet.
What I am looking for is how many different letters I will need in my alphabet.
I highly suggest an nice Abjad with the vowel markings option added. It serves the same as an Alphabet, functions well in it’s pointed/unpointed forms, is much more standardizable and is very compact in script and word length.
Thelurkinghorror told you in the first reply to your OP: “As of 2008, there are 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosodic marks in the IPA.”
For English, or one of the other roughly European languages, you need about 20 to 140 glyphs corresponding to the basic sounds. Once you cross language borders you’ll probably run into lots of trouble though. Especially if your goal is to go world-wide. For example, some east-Asian languages also take into account the pitch, which is pretty much ignored in European languages.
I would be loathe to give up my vowels as separate letters. As a matter of fact, I refuse to do so on principle.
I appreciate Thelurkinghorror’s informational post, but as I mentioned previously,
Let’s assume I don’t want to apply diacritics to the letters in my alphabet. e.g. I do not want what we have in French, e and è and é. In my alphabet, those would be three different letters. How many letters would I need? I assume the answer is not 107 (letters) × 52 (diacritics) × 4 (prosodic marks) = 22256 letters. (but maybe it is!)
P.S. Of course, I’m not really going to go to the trouble of making my own alphabet. But IF I were going to, how many letters would I need?
Or, to rephrase the question, the IPA was constructed to represent a certain number of sounds that exist in current languages. What is the total number of sounds represented in the IPA?
THAT is my goal.
Then the IPA would be your best bet, as they do leave the vowels in as letters (a memory costly, but nicely distinct, feature); while keeping the total alphabet length as concise as possible (as concise a global alphabet can be).
What you want is some sort of…super-Abugida!
Not Vowels x Consonants = Letters but
Letters (Vowels x Consonants?) × Diacritics × Prosodic marks = Full Character list!
You’re mad. That’s just inhuman! You try singing that Alphabet song, bub; you won’t end untill November. Illiteracy will sky-rocket due to the unrememberable Alphabet and the SDMB will be abandoned for real life companionship. We’d be back into the dark ages…