Not sure what to make of that, Peter. It may be that some research in
perception/cognition tells us something about individual human
abilities to process and distinguish "unique sounds" (though that
needs definig!).

Such as for instance that research has found that humans can retain an
oral string of about 7 digits plus or minus. It's a question of
short-term memory. That fact says nothing about which digits (of
course) nor does it imply anything about our capacity to memorize
longer strings of digits.

Similarly, the info about 34 sounds may relate to something but not
have any implications for the number of phonemes we can distinguish,
nor for that matter the optimal number of characters in a script.

But I would be interested to know more if anyone can clarify.

Don

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> Do you agree with the inventor that "humans can only delineate
between about 34 unique sounds"?
>
> --
> Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Don Osborn <dzo@...>
> To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 10:56:47 PM
> Subject: "FaYe" - a proposed new script for Yoruba
>
> I think I've written before that Africa is a continent of many new
> alphabets. One I just recently learned of on the Yoruba language & ICT
> board* is called FaYe, and was developed by Remi-Niyi Alaran.
>
> See: Ijebu Drums blog, Tuesday, September 04, 2007, "The Yoruba FaYe
> writing system" http://ijebudrums. blogspot. com/
>
> Don
>
> * http://www.quicktop ic.com/15/ H/KKgbRqJUAR8 message 317
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>