Re: Abolition of Japanese Kana Signs (was: Neosyllabaries)

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

> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> >
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <grammatim@...>
> > wrote:
> > > i18n@... wrote:
> >
> > > > How about reforms in Japan that led to the
> > > > elimination of certain kana from accepted use

-

> > > > those syllables were replaced with others or
> > > > eliminated in the spoken language, as I
> > > > understand it. I have some old pre-war grade
> > > > school texts I have shown to more modern folks
> > > > and they were puzzled by some of it.
> > >
> > > Then you must misunderstand it.
> >
> > There are a lot of references to /we/ and /wi/
> > being abolished or ceasing to be used - e.g.
> > http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/katakana13.html.
> > Ceasing to be used may be more accurate - a bit
> > like Thai kho khuat and kho khon.
> > They've got Unicode encodings, so one can easily
> > write text saying they aren't used.
>
> "Ceasing to be used" is rather different from "being
> abolished."

What about the abolition of yat from Russian?
Plenty didn't agree at the time but it hasn't come
back yet so it seems to have stuck.

But maybe I'm now creating a new tangent...

It also seems that several spelling reforms in
Icelandic, Dutch, Swedish, and Norwegian have been
embraced by the speakers. Not always immediately.
But I'm not informed enough to know if these reforms
were merely playing catch-up with popular usage.

Andrew Dunbar.

> The iroha poem has 50 characters. The kana chart
> doesn't.
> --
> Peter T. Daniels
> grammatim@...
>

http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl

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