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From: alan@pdn.UUCP (Alan Lovejoy)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: generalised alphabets
Message-ID: <1246@pdn.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Sep-87 10:49:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: pdn.1246
Posted: Thu Sep  3 10:49:51 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 13:44:19 EDT
References: <15488@mordor.s1.gov> <1209@pdn.UUCP> <1296@houdi.UUCP> <1222@pdn.UUCP> <1301@houdi.UUCP>
Reply-To: alan@pdn.UUCP (0000-Alan Lovejoy)
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Xref: mnetor sci.lang:1289 comp.std.internat:206

In article <1301@houdi.UUCP> marty1@houdi.UUCP (M.BRILLIANT) writes:
>>[explanation that my proposal assigns some arbitrary 32-bit
>>index/look-up key to each existing letter, symbol or ideogram]

>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 now think that each letter/symbol/ideogram should be
assigned a unique identifier/look-up key--of possibly varying lengths.
New ones would have to be assigned stanard id's as they are invented.  
Systems would either support a small, fixed set of signs, or else maintain
a database of signs that can be dynamically updated.

The shape and styling of characters tend to change over time, and
software normally should deal with the logical meaning of a sign, not 
its shape ("A" is "A", no matter what font it's in).

>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.

The IPA defines a consonant matrix of three dimensions, where one 
dimension is the type of articulation (plosive, fricative, glide...), 
another is the location (dental, alveolar, glottal...), and the last
is for voicing (voiced, unvoiced).  

For vowels, there is vertical location (high, mid, low), horizontal location
(front, mid, back), tenseness (lax, tense) and shape (wide, narrow).
These categories enable one to produce a sound fairly close to the
actual sound, and the range of sounds possible that still satisfy
the description (front, middle, tense, narrow vowel) is usually
about the same as the range of sounds produced by the speakers of
a language.  If not, there are special modifying symbols that say
"a little more to the back", or "a little higher".  There are also
modifiers for nasality, tone, aspiration, palatalization, and all the
other known variations.

Does that seem satisfactory?

--alan@pdn