suzmccarth wrote:

> I have been reading research on literacy in Canadian syllabics for
> years, and more recently the effects on literacy of Phags-pa, and
> Hangul as well as Syllabics. All of them use orientation to some
> extent. This does not impede literacy, on the contrary the
> organization of alphabetic units into syllables is common to all
> these scripts as well, and has had a more significant effect in the
> opposite direction.
>
> For Syllabics, Phags-pa and Hangul there was a well-recognized
> positive effect on literacy. Unfortunately no one has yet found a
> suitable way to write English in syllables to test whether it would
> have a positive effect on literacy in North America. However, there
> are always researchers who suspect that this would be the case.

Hunh? Phags-pa was in use for less than a century (1269-1368 at the
most), and evidence for it is meager. Mongolia tried reintroducing
Mongolian script in 1989 or 91 or so, but it had been pretty well
extirpated by Cyrillic, and they've apparently gone back to Cyrillic
now; could you be referring to the Mongolian revival?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...