NationStates Jolt Archive

I had a random, but interesting, thought idea the other day as I was flicking through some notes I'd made on the Japanese language.

How difficult would it be to come up with a set of distinct characters to represent each of the syllables used in the English language? And what would such a language look like on paper?

You know, like representing the word Hello as two characters: Heh - lo
or the word English as two or three characters: Ing - lish or Ing - el - ish

So, would anyone like to suggest a few English Kana?

So, would anyone like to suggest a few English Kana?
No, nobody would. :D

No, nobody would. :D
Wah...

*Goes off and cries in the corner*

;_;

I had a random, but interesting, thought idea the other day as I was flicking through some notes I'd made on the Japanese language.

How difficult would it be to come up with a set of distinct characters to represent each of the syllables used in the English language? And what would such a language look like on paper?

You know, like representing the word Hello as two characters: Heh - lo
or the word English as two or three characters: Ing - lish or Ing - el - ish

So, would anyone like to suggest a few English Kana?

That's... incredibly difficult, Kamsaki. That's really going to be incredibly hard. Moreover, the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html) already exists to represent the phonemes of English and other Indo-European languages, though it doesn't do a perfect job of representing all languages.

And I'd split "hello" up like in katakana - make it he - ' - lo, with the glottal stop ' behaving like the little tsus.

That's... incredibly difficult, Kamsaki. That's really going to be incredibly hard. Moreover, the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html) already exists to represent the phonemes of English and other Indo-European languages, though it doesn't do a perfect job of representing all languages.
*Nod*

Incredibly difficult indeed. Though I'm curious as to how people would imagine such a character set to look. Or, indeed, if there are any tricks on representations you would pull to get cheap laughs out of particular syllable associations. >_>;

It would be awfully hard to learn!

Well, you could do it. As a matter of fact, many Japanese already do it (Katakana English is a WONDEFUL thing to listen to), the question is WHY do you want to do it?

That's... incredibly difficult, Kamsaki. That's really going to be incredibly hard. Moreover, the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html) already exists to represent the phonemes of English and other Indo-European languages, though it doesn't do a perfect job of representing all languages.

And I'd split "hello" up like in katakana - make it he - ' - lo, with the glottal stop ' behaving like the little tsus.
Good grief! while I can see the International Phonetic Alphabet being useful for allowing phonologists (Yes, it's a real word. I looked it up. :P) to communicate, I don't think it would be useful to the average person. It would be like trying to discuss colors in terms of RGB values.

One of the biggest problems I can see is, which accent would you use?

I had a random, but interesting, thought idea the other day as I was flicking through some notes I'd made on the Japanese language.

How difficult would it be to come up with a set of distinct characters to represent each of the syllables used in the English language? And what would such a language look like on paper?

You know, like representing the word Hello as two characters: Heh - lo
or the word English as two or three characters: Ing - lish or Ing - el - ish

So, would anyone like to suggest a few English Kana?

I invented one in high school to pass the time.. it looked a bit like a hybrid of arabic and Gregg notation (stenography notation)..

I think I had about 140 characters. I think I can dig it up if I look.

Well, then the english language would be just as hard to read as the japananese! What would be the point of that?:rolleyes:

One of the biggest problems I can see is, which accent would you use?
Yes, exactly. We'd be back to the old days of numerous spellings for a single word. Depending where you were, "hello" could be he-lo or ha-lo or hu-lo or u-lo a-lo .....

How difficult would it be to come up with a set of distinct characters to represent each of the syllables used in the English language? And what would such a language look like on paper?
The characters would be huge, a you'd need to include a hell of a lot of detail to distinguish between all of the hundreds of thousands of syllables in English (compared with a couple of tens of thousands in the Far Eastern languages).

English is very different in structure compared to Japanese. Problem one is the obvious, there is an existing, standard writing system. Even if it sucks, Anglophones are too naive to change it.

Second, there is a large number of different syllables in English, and representing them with single-sound letters is more consistent. The syllables of English are varied: you can have words like "at", and "mat", with different structures (VC and CVC, V=vowel, C=consonant). Japanese has no such problems, because Japanese syllables are of the structure CV, with few exceptions.

Third, English has this problem of ambisyllabicity: a sound may belong to more than one syllable. Like, the word "system" could be split into "syst" and "stem", because "st" may be either end the syllable "syst-" or begin the syllable "-stem".