NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Mid XIX century? Nav
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2005 Nov 22, 01:28 -0500
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2005 Nov 22, 01:28 -0500
On Nov 22, 2005, at 1:08 AM, Frank Reed wrote: > By contrast, some languages have very sparse sound > systems. Japanese and Finnish are good examples of this. To write > English > effectively, we really ought to have about fifteen to twenty more > letters (I say this > only in principle --it would never happen). But you can write down > Japanese > and Finnish with fewer letters than the usual 26 in our alphabet, > and nearly > every word is pronounced exactly the way it's written. > Frank, Chinese and Japanese are also tonal languages, which cannot be conveyed by our alphabet. Fred (not to be transliterated into Frank!)