Re: Reduced Vai Repertoire

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

> At 22:32 +0000 2005-08-20, Richard Wordingham wrote:

Restored context:

I don't expect them to be systematic.

> >The vertical connection in the Ndole syllabary aren't either.

> FEE-VEE, LA-NDA, SA-ZA, KA-GA, JEE-KEE, KPOO-gBOO are there all right.

Sorry, SA-ZA and KPOO-GBOO do show a systematic relationship in the
Ndole syllabary, the extra stroke diacritic, with an extra connecting
stroke. It's unrecognisable as a diacritic in modern ZA!

> It is surely coincidence. Look at the data! There are any number of
> vertical connections, in terms of doublets and triplets and
> quadruplets. None of the horizontal connections you've suggested are
> compelling.

Not in isolation.

> >I had assumed that in Unicode terms the Book of Ndole would have been
> >written in the Vai script. Am I mistaken?
>
> No.
>
> >If I am correct, which of the proposed Vai Unicode characters do you
> >believe the Book of Ndole should be deemed to have used for /J\E/,
> >/JJ\E/ and /jE/?
>
> I don't understand your notation.Figure 5's JE, NJE, and YE are all
> encoded with the character we now read as CE.

Whoops! It was meant to be X-SAMPA (
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/x-sampa.htm ), but I should've
been writing 'j\', not 'J\'. I've been using the all-letter uppercase
numbers as abbreviations for the proposed Unicode names, so by NJEE I
mean what the Unicode Technical Committee has now accepted as VAI
SYLLABLE NJEE. That is the name of the character, whatever it may
have represented in the past.

> >From the history you give, I would indeed say that the character is VAI
> >SYLLABLE CE. A similar and more difficult question goes for /jo/.
>
> YO?

You mean YOO - I wrote /jo/, not /jO/, but I don't think the Book of
Ndole used VAI SYLLABLE YOO, even though a normalised spelling would.

> > > >Wasn't the Vai script constructed?
> >>
> >> We aren't constructing it now, so we aren't at liberty to change it
> >> in the way that it seemed to me that you were suggesting.
> >
> >I'm hardly changing anything. I'm just suggesting ordering the
> >symbols block by block.
>
> We are following Tombekai's recommendations for the order of the

consonants.

And my suggested scheme is a bit more consistent - 'MB' can always
comes before 'KP' :) ('B' and 'MB' are equally mixed up in both
schemes if you count ordinally, but if one counts distances, again
less so in the block by block scheme.)

Richard.