Re: white space, I haven't been able so far to decide whether white space
is over-rated, or languages such as Thai (and Chinese), which don't
separate individual words by white space, simply do their users a
disservice.
I once saw a study that measured the amount of eye movement of Chinese
readers vs. readers of a European language, and the Chinese eye movements
jumped all over the text, apparently seeking word boundaries, while the
European speakers' were more linear and straightforward.

stevo

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 8:49 AM, R A Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On 18/12/2011 20:04, Gary Shannon wrote:
>
>> Here's a random idea for a writing system.
>>
>> There is an alphabet of 25 or 30 characters that share
>> the same visual aspect ratio being roughly the same
>> proportions as the Roman capitals.
>>
>> Then there is a second set of perhaps only 8 or 10
>> characters that are visually distinct from the first
>> group, perhaps by being very slender, or by having
>> ascenders or descenders.
>>
>> The roots of the language are spelled with letters from
>> the first set. But no word is complete until some suffix
>>  is attached to specify what aspect of the root that
>> word
>>
>
> Similar in many respects to Brx, in which roots are written
> in letters of the Roman alphabet, and morpheme boundaries
> are shown by (at present) = or - or . or
> punctuation/white-space. (The symbols = and - and . all have
> phonetic value).  I guess the biggest difference is my
> inclusion of punctuation/white-space as an indicator of
> morpheme boundary.
>
> [snip]
>
>
>  Now the really interesting aspect of this is that the
>> assignment of the character sequences to the roots could
>>  be completely arbitrary, without regard to the spoken
>> sound of the word. That being the case, the system of
>> writing would be independent of any specific phonology. A
>> string of characters could just as easily represent a
>> single English word as a single Italian word,
>>
>
> Like Wilkin's "real Character" and other pasigraphies of the
> 18th centuries and more recent attempts such as Blissymbols.
>
> On 19/12/2011 09:50, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
>
>  On 18 December 2011 21:04, Gary Shannon wrote:
>>
>>
>>> So the writing would be arbitrary, but not pictographic
>>> or ideographic, and not connected in any way to the
>>> phonology of any language. It should probably used with
>>> a non-inflecting language since we wouldn't want to
>>> waste lexical space on inflections. That would just
>>> needlessly reduce the maximum potential lexicon size.
>>> (Or perhaps a third class of alphabetic characters, or
>>> even diacritics, used only to represent inflections.)
>>>
>>>
>>>  This is not unlike the writing system for Azak, one of my
>> first conlang (you can read about it here:
>> http://rainbow.conlang.free.**fr/Conlang/MesConlangs/Azak/**ecriture.html<http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr/Conlang/MesConlangs/Azak/ecriture.html>
>> ,
>>
>>
>>  although I must warn you that it's in French. There are
>> pictures of the writing system though :) ). Basically, in
>> Azak stems are written using an angular alphabet, while
>> suffixes are written with a syllabary (a weird one, most
>> VC, with a few VCVC signs). There are no prefixes, and
>> all words have at least one suffix, so segmenting is
>> obvious and spaces are not necessary.
>>
>
> Segmenting unambiguous in Bax (Piashi) and no white-space
> was needed. But i found that writing out whole strings
> without white-space made reading difficult.  In Bax this was
> not helped all the characters being Roman letters, the
> self-segregation being achieved rules governing use of
> consonant and vowel symbols.  I guess if other symbols are
> being used for morpheme boundaries, white-space could be
> dispensed with.
>
> Thinks: Maybe I should try this out with Brx?
>
> --
> Ray
> ==============================**====
> http://www.carolandray.plus.**com <http://www.carolandray.plus.com>
> ==============================**====
> Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
> There's none too old to learn.
> [WELSH PROVERB]
>