> The point at which they differ is one of degree, not kind.
> Cognitively, reading works by seeing a squiggle on a page, and
> 'pattern-matching' against a (vocalisable) word. The main
> functional difference between alphabetic scripts and logographic
> ones is that in the latter case, there may or may not be some
> more-or-less phonetic reading of a (written) word, which is
> important when you're learning a language, and when you encounter
> a 'new' word. But it's not infeasible by any means to have
> an alphabetic script for a language which is bizarrely un-phonetic
> (nominations on a postcard...), which could quite easily be
> the 'Western' situation.
Are you saying that the Western script would be an alphabetical script where the characters do not represent building blocks for sound??
What an interesting notion.
What would they represent in that case? They would have to represent something, atoms of a word, you can actually use to construct words with.
I suppose you could say that some of the squiggles in a chinese pictogram represents one "character". But each such character has no meaning of its own. I do not think I would call it alphabetical!
Sign languages for deaf persons (a ideographic language in a very short-lived medium) does indeed have alphabetical signs that (for the deaf) do not represent sounds, but written characters. But their meaning is derived from our normal spoken languages, so in a way they represent sound anyhow.
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