> -----Original Message-----
> From: Raven Travillian [mailto:siobhan@massage-research.com]
> Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 2:10 PM
>
> Not exactly unheard of. Books for children, books for
> foreigners learning
> the language, books about historical changes in pronounciation in the
> Chinese language, all have annotations for punctuation, similar to the
> Japanese _furigana_. And bopomofo is a standardized system
> for indicating
> such pronounciations.
>
I suspected something like this was probably the case. So here are some
more general questions somebody on the list might be able to answer:
- Just what _is_ the distribution of kanji/katakana/hiragana in
Japanese text? Surely somebody has run the numbers on this. A related
question: what is the distribution of furigana.
- How does Korean annotate Chinese characters? Hangul?
- Is such phonological annotation a standard component of any other
writing systems?
- Is there a middle way between the extremes of Japanese/Chinese
(annotational subsystem) and English (no standard "metalanguage" for
expressing phonemic structure)? I mean in actual historic use. To a
certain extent one could construe English (European latinate) punctuation
and wordspacing as a metalanguage whose purpose is to guide word recognition
(and therefore pronunciation). Early Arabic used color-coded marks.
Anything else?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:56 EDT