lets remember that most alphabets/ scripts out there are far from perfect renditions of the languages they represent. Without some knowledge of how a particular language is supposed to sound, it is very hard to get it right just from reading the writing. For example, the script used to write tibetan is used for many other languages including sanskrit, which is a very complex language.
A universal, or at least a global alphabet, needs to contain enough phenomes to represent all sounds capable of being produced, but of course each country/language group would only use the letters relavent to them. Redundancy is not a problem, because the language barrier is a bigger problem.
However a decent global script could be a big step forward.
Another thought: it needs to be easy to write - cursive, and still look like the printed script (many cursive varieties really dont look an aweful lot like the printed version), or perhaps to say the printed script needs to look like the cursive.
consonnats need to be added together in various ways to represent complex sounds, and vowel dicritics area good idea because it cuts down on the number of major signs.
Relashionships between sounds can be used to cut down the number of basic signs which can them be modified in various ways : eg p,b,f,v,m or k,g,kh,gh,ng etc. - voiced, unvoiced etc
so my vote is for a phonetic based alphabet with dicritics. Tonal qualities are rarely represented in scripts anyway so whether this is included or not is open for debate…
True, but who says a script must be a perfect representation of how natives speak? This idea would have problems in itself, because even within the same language everyone speaks/articulates/pronounces the lang differently. In such dialect cases the letters themselves often take on the local regional pronunciation. No fuss, no muss.
If letters did not do this (if they had a strict fixed pronunciation that perfectly matched local pronunciation) you would need either a huge alphabet per lang, that would only be half used by each local region (like what is done with the IPA), or a set of uniquely local alphabets for each regional dialect. This would make any dialect impossibly difficult to read. Imagine if, to use a familiar example, Zombie was spelled phonetically. The western dialect of Zombie would be pronounced “Uhhh nuuuh gaaaaah” while the eastern dialect is pronounced “Huaaa nuuua guaaaaa”. Both are mutually intelligible to native Zombie ear sockets, both have the same meaning (“You gonna eat all of that hippocampus and thalamus?”), however without a standard spelling (with a standard alphabet) the written forms become very difficult to decipher. Preventing widespread literacy and learning.
This holds true for other languages such as English, French etc… Imagine how difficult English would be if every regional dialect (Jamaican patois, Scottish, Newfie, etc) each had alphabets that accurately reflected their dialects and their was no standard? Chaos! :eek:
That’s the real question, because the presumption here seems to be that the purpose of an alphabet is to represent a language phonetically.
That’s not (strictly speaking) the actual function of alphabets (except for those in early literacy and L2 learners).
The goal of the OP is trying to squeeze the writing systems of all languages together into one mushy ball according to a criterion that isn’t really germane.
If you think that some sort of a universal suitable-for-children-learning-to-read alphabet could be applied to all languages, you don’t understand how phonology works. Languages do not pick their phonemes from a set of sounds so that they do not overlap with the phonemes of other languages. Every language has phonemes that overlap with the phonemes of every other language. Every time you learn a new language, you have to learn what the phonemes of that language are. This always means that you have to learn that a group of sounds in your native language that constitute a single phoneme are broken up into two or more phonemes in the new language you’re learning. Furthermore, this always means that a phoneme in the new language you’re learning is broken up into two or more phonemes in your native language. The universal alphabet would be no help in learning this. It might even be better, in fact, to have completely unrelated alphabets for your native language and the new one that you’re learning. That way you don’t feel as tempted to pronounce the new language like your native one.
IPA is useful for linguists who want to describe the phonology of every language in an accurate way, but it’s far too complicated for children just learning to read. What a child needs to learn is a relatively small alphabet that’s connected in a simple way with the phonemes of their language. (It occurs to me now that I’m ignoring syllabaries, but that’s going to be too complicated to explain.) Incidentally, there aren’t “hundreds of writing systems.” There are maybe about a dozen for nearly all the 6,912 (or whatever the current number is) languages on Earth today. The Roman alphabet (which English uses) is one of them. Many of the languages using the Roman alphabet slightly modify it by adding a few letters or adding diacritical marks. Again, if anything this might make it slightly harder to learn another language using the Roman alphabet because the phonemes are slightly different in the language you’re learning.
This isn’t to say that it might not be a good idea for some languages to institute some spelling changes in their language to make them more consistent and easier for children to learn.
Why is it that 9 times out 10 when a new person creates a Zombie thread, they put a title on their post? That’s about the only time you ever see that here.
Because zombies are usually resurrected by newbies who don’t know how the board operates, and thus don’t know that that field in the post form is unnecessary.
I’d say it’s more like 5 times out of 10, (but I’m not bored enough to research the issue.) It’s obviously because they’ve just joined, and don’t know the posting customs. The thread is three years old, but that doesn’t mean the conversation has to be over; nor does it mean that a newcomer wont’ have something valuable to add. (The point about cursive-like script is a good one. I just think the overall idea is misguided.) I don’t think they put in the title because it’s some kind of consciously conducted zombie revival campaign .
Many languages have different phonetics depending on dialect. Some of those languages (Spanish for example) use the same spelling regardless of speaker dialect, the culture to which they’re linked to views it as unusual to render dialectal speech phonetically; others (English) use different spellings in different countries and view it as perfectly normal to render dialectal speech phonetically; others use different spellings for dialectal pronunciations or not depending on the writer’s political bent (Catalan/Valenciano).
Different cultures, linked to different languages, solve the issue of different pronunciations in different ways. How does the universal alphabet solve them? If one single way is picked, it forces a change in those languages/cultures which used a different one.
The phonetic alphabet is specifically used to render phonetics, not to write novels. But what you propose would be used to write novels, so: with or without dialectal renderings?
The biggest problem with the IPA is that it’s equipped for phones not phonemes. For instance, if a language has b and not v, speakers of that language will hear the sounds ‘b’ and ‘v’ as the same (usually) – and in fact a speaker may use either sound depending on various factors. In fact, this is somewhat the problem with ‘r’ and ‘l’ in English, in a number of languages (esp. Southeast Asian) they’re simply not distinct phonemes, despite being distinct phones. This means that even within a given dialect, it can be a tossup whether you want to represent a given phoneme as one or the other (though I’ll grant that linguists already deal with this so it’s probably a workable issue).
This leads to a second problem – standardized spelling. If you use IPA out of the box, there are countless ways to spell a given word depending on dialect and other things. I would argue that what we have now in English goes too far the other way (words spelled in ways nobody pronounces them), but I’m not sure letting people spell everything the way they say it is exactly going to help – it will probably greatly increase the difficulty of reading (see the thread on Mercan) while only slightly increasing the ease of writing. You could say “well, then standardize spelling to a specific dialect”, but to me that defeats the point of using IPA in the first place. I don’t know, maybe it’s workable and I’m overreacting.
The thing is, I don’t see written language as an expression of spoken language; rather, written language is an independent language closely related to a spoken one. When quoting speech, you’re not just writing down words, you’re translating a spoken language to a written one. And just as spoken language is ultimately arbitrary, spelling is also ultimately arbitrary.