john jenkins wrote:

>On Wednesday, November 14, 2001, at 10:15 AM, william bright wrote:
>
>> i'm surprised how often the present correspondence refers to tolkien
>> scripts and other scripts invented by philologers (which tolkien was) or
>> linguists or hobbyists, for fun or for experimental purposes rather than
>> for practical use. surely there is very little limit to the typological
>> characteristics of scripts invented by imaginative people. but what is
>> interesting *to me* at least is: what characteristics of scripts WORK for
>> communication in human societies?
>>
>
>I've spent the last couple of years actually using both Deseret and
>Shavian and it's been an interesting experience. Both are seriously
>flawed IMHO as reading scripts, but for different reasons.
>
>In the case of Deseret, there are no descenders or ascenders. Except when
>a word is capitalized, each word is rectangular, which makes it hard to
>distinguish words without parsing them. Moreover, there are *faux amis*
>among the letter shapes, such as a "C"-like letter which is used for the M
>sound.

but of course cyrillic has very little in the way of ascenders and
descenders. it would be interesting to test whether biscriptal readers of
cyrillic and roman serbo-croatian, in the former yugoslavia, found any
difference in the "readability" of the two scripts. of course most of them
probably had emotional preferences either for cyrillic serbian, on the one
hand, or roman croatian on the other hand, and that could make a difference.

of course cap letters are another feature that give words added
"topography" in european languages. but most asian writing systems seem to
do nicely without capitals, and without anything much that corresponds to
european ascenders and descenders.

the late great anthropologist a.l. kroeber used to say that he liked to use
lots of semicolons because they gave a sentence "topography". i agree.

anyway, it may all depend on what you're used to! cheers; bill
--
William Bright
Professor Emeritus of Linguistics & Anthropology, UCLA
Professor Adjoint of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder
Editor, Written Language and Literacy
Editor, Native American Placenames of the United States
1625 Mariposa Avenue, Boulder, CO 80302
Tel. 303-444-4274
FAX 303-413-0017
Email william.bright@..., williamobright@...

William Bright's website: http://www.ncidc.org/bright