suzmccarth wrote:

> Very cute! The difference is that in this case we do, in fact, know
> where these symbols come from. For Brahmi and Cree we don't know how
> the system was thought up.

That's true. Yet, some hypothesis sound intrinsically more naive that
others...

It is sad that Evans, or people who worked with him, left no account of how
he made up the script.

Did anyone ever investigate the local newspapers of his time, to see whether
he ever released interviews? Such an investigation could be a good
graduation thesis for a Cree student of linguistics did you try looking up
the archives of paste theses in Canadian universities?

> I am not so much talking about the shapes
> of the discreet units but the idea that there should be a series of
> regular combinations which could be displayed in a matrix.

To me, that seems like a very intuitive idea, that could have occurred to
many people. But perhaps that's just becaused I'm used to it.

> BTW, did you say that there was a syllable chart for Italian or was
> it just a strategy to teach the syllables systematically.

Actually, it was not really a matrix. It was rather a kind of drill that we
were required to do: the teacher wrote meaningless syllables on the board
(e.g., all combinations of letters B, C, D followed by all five vowels) and
we were required to read aloud the syllable she pointed to.

Or else, we were given as homework to write down a certain consonants with
all vowels, or all consonants with a certain vowels. I think that at some
point (Christmas holidays perhaps?) we had the scaring task of writing down
*all* possible CV combination on a big foolscap sized sheet.

I remember having done similar drills when I was 14 and I studied English in
Britain. These drills were terribly boring for all pupils from Europe,
Pakistan or other places where "alphabetic" scripts were in use, and we
often complained that we needed to learn English, not the ABC's.

But I understood that these drills were tageted to Chinese pupils (there
were lots of people from Hong Kong), because they had a trend to memorizing
the spelling of every single word they learned, rather than trying and
understand the logic behind spelling. In fact, Chinese were the only ones
which fond these drills difficult; they complains were more like "I've never
heard the word 'ba' or 'lawt' before, so how can I know how it is spelled?"

> That I have
> certainly seen used in French and SIL teaches it as a literacy
> technique. I have no idea however, what the earliest instance of
> arranging a writing system into a matrix would be and whether it
> appeared independently in different lgs and cultures. I suppose CJK
> have these charts also but where was it used first?

Do you mean Chinese characters? No, how could they have such a chart? It is
a logographic script, so there are multiple characters for each syllable.

But I have seen a similar chart with the Chinese characters used for the
standard transcription of foreign words or names. You can see it in the
"Chinese writing system" entry of Florian Coulmas' "The Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Writing Systems".

But that's a modern device, mainly designed to help journalists who cover
foreign news. There are of course standard transcriptions for well-known
places or people such as "Baghdad" or "George Bush", but journalists also
need to come up with on-the-fly transcriptions for the name a small village
hit by a tornado somewhere in the world, or the surname of a member of some
parliament who released an interview to a Chinese reporter.

> Have you published your article on the different scripts with the
> English cognate word lists?

Not yet. The publisher is still getting crazy trying to typeset all those
different scripts...

--
Cingar