OT: Orthography [Was: Re: Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme]

Mark Wilson mwilson13 at cox.net
Wed Oct 8 14:06:19 EDT 2003


On Wednesday, October 8, 2003, at 01:22 PM, Alexander Schmolck wrote:

> Pascal Bourguignon <spam at thalassa.informatimago.com> writes:
>
>> Well,  I would say  that kanji  is badly  designed, compared  to latin
>> alphabet.   The voyels  are composed  with consones  (with diacritical
>> marks) and  consones are  written following four  or five  groups with
>> additional diacritical  marks to  distinguish within the  groups. It's
>> more a phonetic code than a true alphabet.
>
> Huh? You seem to be confused (BTW French is misleading here: it's 
> vowels and
> consonants in English). *Kanji* are not phonetic, you seem to be 
> talking about
> *kana*. And the blanket claim that Japanese spelling in kana is badly 
> designed
> compared to say, English orthography seems really rather dubious to me.
>

The most linguistically advanced and best phonetic alphabet is Korean 
hangul. See:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

Regards,

Mark Wilson






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