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From: marty1@houdi.UUCP (M.BRILLIANT)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: generalised alphabets
Message-ID: <1301@houdi.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Sep-87 17:30:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: houdi.1301
Posted: Tue Sep  1 17:30:19 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 05:07:24 EDT
References: <15488@mordor.s1.gov> <1209@pdn.UUCP> <1296@houdi.UUCP> <1222@pdn.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel
Lines: 49
Summary: Do you want to handle all possible, or all existing, languages?
Xref: mnetor sci.lang:1278 comp.std.internat:198

In article <1222@pdn.UUCP>, alan@pdn.UUCP (Alan Lovejoy) writes:
> In article <1296@houdi.UUCP> marty1@houdi.UUCP (M.BRILLIANT) writes:
> >A 32-bit number could code any possible character that can be described
> >in a square 16 pixels on a side...
> 
> An error ....
> 
> (1) .....  For a 16 x 16 matrix 
> of black or white pixels, there are 2^256 possibilities and a 256-bit
> number is required.

Sorry, that was careless of me.  A 32-bit number will encode almost all
6x6 characters, more with run-length coding.  Not very impressive.

> ... and a misunderstanding:

> 2) This is NOT what I had in mind at all.  I wanted a simple index to
> be assigned to each EXISTING character or ideogram, which index would
> be an abstraction independent of any particular graphical representation
> or font.

Then your scheme might have to change if another language is to be
added, or if some language creates another ideograph.  There are
thousands of languages in the world, with I don't know how many
different alphabets.  I wanted to avoid limiting the scope to existing
alphabets and prove that all possible alphabets could be included.

Actually, I gather that Chinese ideographs follow certain conventions
inscrutable to the alphabetic mind, and that there's a typesetting
system for them.  That would make it easier to represent them in a
universal alphabet, even if they need more than one 32-bit number
each.  I hope other languages are as easy.

> >I'm even less certain about the representation of speech sounds...
> >.....  Coding each sound in 32 bits implies that a vocoder could
> >encode human speech at 320 bits per second.  Is that possible?
> 
> There is something called the International Phonetic Alphabet, which
> uses various modifiers to enable the transcription of any human 
> speech sound with less than 256 symbols....

I'm not certain it's literally true that the IPA can describe any human
speech sound, not just the sounds in a particular set of known
languages.  For instance, could it describe the tone system of
Chinese?  If that's true, you have a feasible proposal.

M. B. Brilliant					Marty
AT&T-BL HO 3D-520	(201)-949-1858
Holmdel, NJ 07733	ihnp4!houdi!marty1