Re: The Western language debate once more

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 15:47:34 +0100 (BST)


David Cake:
> The summary of positions seems to come down to some folk want
> the West to be more like a familiar medieval European (or Arabic)
> model, and so they go for 'Brithini Latin' even though its a stretch
> from what is said, and some folks want the West to be less like a
> familiar model and more uniquely its own, and so they favour a
> Brithini Kanji model.

Here's another summary: some people want to have a Western logographic script for the sheer heck of it; other people have expounded a series of concrete arguments against this (like an apparent lack of monosyllabic morphemes, a clear lack of syllabic regularity, the mass use of foreign words in this script, and the existence of self-evidently alphabetic acronyms), which the first camp don't even both to engage with, instead simply equating the two positions:

> and it comes down to how personal taste

Oh, goodie. Whose? It's all very well to say (N)IMG, but surely the purpose of airing these things here is to engage with the actual issues. On most of these issues I'm happy enough to muddle through with the "let a hundred schools contend" sort of approach ("interesting idea: I'm sure we can find somewhere it's true") but there is, by canonical statute, only one Western script, and no-one is likely to get very far with fleshing it out in any respect whatsoever unless some pretty basic facts about it are determined.

Cheers,
Alex.


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