--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately I cannot open the Vai Unicode Proposal on dialup. I
> > think the problem here is that "a contrast already existed between
> > pairs of consonants with some vowels."
>
> It is not large - 1,026 kbytes. (It only took me about 3 minutes by
> dial-up.) Would you like a paper copy by air mail?

Okay - to be honest, I am on battery power, no hydro here, and I have
to charge up this thing by a certain obscure method, so at that time I
was running low on battery. I will find an internet cafe tomorrow.
Then 3 minutes won't stress me out. Just to add to the fun I have to
keep the candle wax and bat poop off the keyboard.

On rereading Singler I decided that there could have been about 63
original symbols. What do you think?

p, b_ (implosive), kp, f, t, d_, s, k, V

9 X 7 = 63

I think these following rows are the most recent in time.

1. v, z, and 3 out of 4 rows of palatals. Take off 5 rows. Loan words
only.

2. All prenasalized stops can be collapsed into the related implosive
or other stop consonant. They were not marked in the sample text.
minus 4 rows

3. w and h row - minus 2 rows

4. collapse l into d or y. minus 1 row

5. Collapse voiced consnants into unvoiced. minus 4 rows.

6. Possibly nasal syllables were marked with the related implosive.

That gives only 63 symbols left.

However, I highly doubt that this would be enough now. I think
probably 16 out of 31 rows are needed. From the early 20 century
sample text provided in the chapter these are the consonants used.

b, b_, d, d_, f, k, kp, l, s, y, w, h, t, V and nasal n and m. From
the size of the sample I would estimate that that is 90% of nescessary
consonants. Add p and possibly more nasal rows.

This is only a guidline from the sample text.

I looked at Cree again and realized that only 9 rows x 4 columns = 36
symbols are necessary, but most syllabaries now show 14 rows and 7
columns, 98 syllables. Add 5 more rows for preaspirate consonants and
that would be 19 rows. So a linguist could have provided a syllabary
of 7 x 19 for Cree, then double that because each vowel can be
labialized, 'w' and the list goes on. Add all the syllable final s's
and n's in as well and the actual number of different syllables is
enormous. But given all that, Cree orthography with 36 syllables seems
pretty straighforward to me - not at all vague and suggestive. There
just aren't that many lexical ambiguities in a lg with multisyllabic
words.

Suzanne