From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Date: 8 Apr 92 21:08:11 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Apr7.175015.16769@cis.ohio-state.edu> schuyler@violin.cis.ohio-state.edu (Carlton Schuyler) writes:

< <...> actually, digraphs seem to be a pretty good idea.

Not really.  They aren't always applicable, and may make reading more
difficult, especially if there are many of them.

[Hungarian:]
<	gy, ty, ny are palatal (I don't know which of these are
<                                coronal; I suspect that gy is not and
<                                the other two are)

Wrong, whatever you mean by "palatal".  /gy/, /ty/ and /ny/ have the
same place of articulation.

<I can't think of a whole lot of words (proper names excluded) which
<have a standalone y.

There is not a single one.  The letter "y" is reserved to be used only
as a second element in digraphs.

<	cs sz zs dzs  are  ch, s (Hungarian s = sh), zh, g/j/dzh in one
<                      commonly used transliteration scheme. 
<
<In all the cases above, the letters in the digraph can never (or
<nearly never) occur adjacent to each other.

Lying is a sin, Carl.  As you should know, compounding in Hungarian is
a productive word-building strategy, so the number of compound words
in which the first element ends in "s" and the second starts with "z",
or the other way around, is unlimited.  No, there is no way to guess
which words they are, unless you know the language.

<According to which language you're talking about, constraints on the
<distribution of sounds will lead to different possibilities for
<digraphs.  As Hungarian shows, it's possible to come up with "logical"
<mappings which lead to unambiguous phonological representations.

Hungarian shows that there is at least one language for which it is
possible to come up with "logical" mappings which lead to not-too-
ambiguous phonological representations.  It doesn't show anything that
would hold for just any language.

<The English system of using th for (theta or thorn)

... and eth...

<is interesting
<when you look at the pronunciation of a lot of speakers of Indian
<English.  They may pronounce th as a distributed voiceless aspirated
<dental stop.  <...>  <...> since the
<English use of th for the interdental fricative does correspond
<"logically" to what the sound actually resembles, there is a dialect
<of English which does not have (theta) in which the orthography
<nevertheless makes a kind of "sense".  Who follows this train of
<thought??

I'm afraid I don't.

<Perhaps there are other languages in which orthographies
<make similar sense.  Polish comes immediately to mind (when thinking
<about the distinction in point of articulation for sz, si, and s', for
<instance), although I don't know how to pronounce Polish, so never mind.

Indeed.  If you suppose that the Polish use of "sz" makes any kind of
sense, apart from being just an arbitrary convention, you sure can't
have any idea how Polish is pronounced.
-- 
---- --- -- -  Long Live the Rose and the Heather!  - -- --- ----
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK