Re: Perhaps all of India should adopt one script


mb wrote:
ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
mb wrote:
Considering Indian scripts, is there a single Brahmi based script
suitable for writing all Indian languages? I had to put together 3
scripts (Unicode Devanagari, Gurmukhi and Bengali) to arrive at a
phonetic superset of Devanagari that can be used to write an arbitrary
mixture of words from all the IE and Dravidian official languages of
India and her provinces. (IE languages include Urdu and English, of
course.)

That's because you are stuck with thinking in phonetic terms. It's not
about an arbitray mixture of terms, and it's not about particular
sounds. Assigning a phoneme value to a sign or combination of signs for
each language is not a big deal and of course you can write any
language with any system. All the rest is emotion or politics.

OK; let's say I speak a dialect with one set of phonemes and a mixture
of Malayalam, Tamil and English words. Someone else speaks another
dialect with a different set of phonemes and a mixture of Malayalam,
Tulu and English words. We can make ourselves understood to each other.
How do we write to each other? Do we have to learn each other's
phonemes and what graphemes are used for them before we set pen to
paper?

The proportion of such words and the phonemic distances from the script
are not likely to as huge, in such a case, as to impair communication.

Consider the cognates Tamil /un.d.a:ji/ vs. Malayalam /un.d.a:ji/. They
had the same phonemes and were originally the same word in an ancestor
of both languages and they still nominally have the same phonemes since
the scripts are supposed to be phonemic. Now, they have different
pronunciations and meanings, like English egregious and Italian
egregio. How do I use both words, in writing? In what script do I write
them and from where do I get extra graphemes every time I find that yet
another phone is a phoneme in my idiolect?

You somewhat confirm my saying that you are stuck in phonology. If
there is any script simplification the aim is not to unify speech,

My speech is already what it is, so there's nothing to unify. I have
both words in my idiolect. My question is how I write down a sentence
or paragraph where I use both words.

Didn't get through. We were talking of unifying the script, provided it
offers a major incentive to learning.

If the continuum keeps going on and on, then unifying the script would
mean a single script for the whole continuum.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Perhaps all of India should adopt one script
    ... suitable for writing all Indian languages? ... dialect with a different set of phonemes and a mixture of Malayalam, ... The proportion of such words and the phonemic distances from the script ... How do I use both words, in writing? ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Perhaps all of India should adopt one script
    ... suitable for writing all Indian languages? ... of Malayalam, Tamil and English words. ... dialect with a different set of phonemes and a mixture of Malayalam, ... The proportion of such words and the phonemic distances from the script ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Perhaps all of India should adopt one script
    ... suitable for writing all Indian languages? ... dialect with a different set of phonemes and a mixture of Malayalam, ... Tulu and English words. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Transcribing rhotics for ESL
    ... I'm less likely to run into a problem if I teach English to ... Essentially I'm trying to treat multiple languages as a single ... and grouping phonemes across them appropriately. ... English transcriptions can be a source of frustration for students, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Which Is The Better Approach To Working With Javascript?
    ... implementation has no interprocess communication capability, ... Java SCRIPT runs in the browser exclusively. ... and several languages have been written for a single environment: ...
    (comp.lang.php)