Vicki's Right - and well thought out...
The Chinese have a different but similar problem.. Their pictographs
originally were sposed to be ideographic - compound ideas to represent more
difficult concepts, etc..
The problem was that Han Chinese was only one of hundreds of varied dialects
that developed over the millenia (Chinas a huge place). To make a long story
short, Chinese today is a combination of ideographic, phonetic (horse+female
means mother as horse indicates a "ma" sound.) deflective ( ideographs one
step removed etc.) and lastly there are pictures that represent things that
noone can figure out how and why the hell they got that way. :)
As [[ethnoconvergence]] continues at its speedy rate - the notions of
holding onto traditional ways of doing things should simply be left to
happen, But this wont happen - it will cause people to get pissy and wars
will happen and thats what sucks about humanity. Funny I just read a little
piece about this in a well known graphic novel - (email for the torrent
file - clear a cd worth of disk.)
But Vicki hits it. I think the answer (in part) is a pure ideographic
system - based on the thousands of years development of Han gi (Kanji). This
could cross boundaries and be language independent. And yes, Daniel, I would
be more than glad to correspond with you on developing this idea further.
Get a trial copy of FlashMX - and email me.
WikiLovin to all :) -SM
The problem with phonetic spelling is, always, whose
dialect? The Texan
one
that Molly
Ivins renders by spelling business "bidness"? New York, with our wondrous
mix of four
centuries of languages and accents? Glaswegian? A friend of mine was
greatly confused
when someone told her that "The mile is on strike"--she wondered what that
meant, and
whether they could use kilometers instead, before realizing that while
she'd heard "mile",
her Australian friend had meant "mail."
As for making English easier, the language has the momentum of a billion
speakers.
Efforts at standardizing on any simplified English have fallen down
because
people
want the flexibility they get from wide vocabulary (which is not unique to
English--the
same problem would emerge in trying to standardize and simplify any living
language).
Making individual articles, paragraphs, and sentences clearer and easier
to
read is a
worthwhile task. It's one of the ways I make my living. And it can't be
reduced to a
formula.