Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@...> wrote:

>> I wonder if that's why I find lowercase Cyrillic text so tiresome
>> to read -- most letters are simply small versions of the uppercase
>> letters, unlike Latin and Greek.
>
> More than that, even, there's the paucity of descenders and
> ascenders, and the monotonous pair of serifs above and below like
> trolley tracks.

That's basically what I meant. Lowercase Cyrillic is just like
uppercase Cyrillic (and Latin and Greek), with relatively uniform
heights and shapes. Reading Cyrillic feels like reading Latin
formatted in smallcaps.

> English has not abandoned "phonemic spelling principles," but it has
> grown in a way that has made them quite complex (and I feel -- but
> haven't yet demonstrated -- that the amount of "logography" in
> English is about on a par with that in Chinese or Japanese: that is,
> you need to memorize stuff like bomb/comb/tomb and the dozen-odd
> <ough> words, and all that sort of irregularity will add up to a few
> thousand forms at most, and of course the irregularity is
> concentrated in the commonest and shortest words). For the
> regularities, see Carney, *Survey of English Spelling* (Routledge,
> 1994).

I admit that "abandoned" was too strong a word. I was thinking of all
the "stuff" you mentioned that must be memorized irrespective of
spelling.

Certainly, it is true that experienced readers (cf. children) read
groups of letters rather than one letter at a time. And, as was
highlighted in the previous discussion on Han/Kanji characters, most
of them can be decomposed, meaning that CJK speakers don't really have
to memorize 10,000 completely different symbols after all.

-Doug Ewell doug_ewell@... or dewell@...