[Lexicog] Re: Using older dictionaries

[Michael Everson]

On 23 Dec 2009, at 08:01, William J Poser wrote:

> On your point about the West African syllabaries, two points:
>
> (a) many societies just haven't found sufficient need for extensive
>    list-making to have chosen the order of characters in their writing
>    system as the basis for making lists,

Yes, but now that the scripts are going to be encoded, this has to be  
addressed.

> or if they have, they use
>    something else. Note, for example, the use of the heavenly stems
>    for making lists in Chinese and Japanese.

Those are interesting. There are only ten; I'd tend to think of them  
as analogous to the way we use roman numerals in outlines and so on.  
The Wikipedia gives some examples; none are ordered wordlists of  
course. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_stems#Current_usage

> (b) when an order is assigned to the characters of a writing system,  
> it
>    doesn't have to have any relationship to sound.

It usually does in terms of syllabaries; when it does not, the order  
is typically bound to some other sort of mnemonic. We learn our own  
alphabet, for instance, by singing a rhyme. (I am told anecodotally  
that Russians have no such rhyme, which is why all Russian  
dictionaries list the Russian alphabet in the front matter. I am not  
sure how tongue-in-cheek this anecdote was.)


> In Japanese, for example, there are two orderings of the kana. One,  
> which is the dominant order today, is sort of phonological. The  
> consonants are ordered in a way that is essentially the Sanskrit  
> order of of their Old Japanese antecedants, and within each "row",  
> the order of the vowels is consistently a-i-u-e-o. Thus, it begins:
> a i u e o ka ki ku ke ko sa si su se so ta ti tu te to...

Right, and this is the typical arrangement for syllabaries:

Inuktitut is ordered i u a h pi pu pa p ti tu ta t ki ku ka k...
(the order of the consonant orders is more or less phonetic, not  
exactly like Pitman shorthand, but analogous).

Cherokee is ordered a e i o u v ga ka ge gi go gu gv
(the order of the consonant orders is based on Latin:
g/k h l m n/hn qu s d/t dl/tl ts w y

Vai orders differently from Japanese, or Inuktitut, or Cherokee. It  
does all the consonants in -e first, then all the consonants in -i,  
then all the consonants in a, then -o, then -u, then -ɔ, then -ɛ. The  
order is e-i-a-o-u-ɔ-ɛ, and I analysed this as deriving from American  
missionaries with a southern accent: [eɪ iː aː oː juː]  
representing A-E-I-O-U plus ɔ and ɛ.
The consonants themselves are ordered more or less phonetically:
Ø h w p b ɓ mɓ kp mgb gb f v t d l r ɗ nɗ s ʃ z tʃ dʒ ndʒ j k  
ŋg g m n ñ

Grapically, many Vai characters with similar-sounding consonants have  
similar shapes, which is evident in the ordering. This, I am sure,  
helps people find things in dictionary. Or will, when a dictionary or  
telephone book or whatever is eventually created.

> The other order, known as the "iroha" order after the first three  
> characters, is devoid of phonological content. It is a poem in  
> Classical Japanese, apparently constructed for the purpose of  
> ordering the kana. It is still used to a limited extent: you'll find  
> lists indexed this way. I am not aware of any evidence that Japanese  
> people had any particular difficulty in learning the poem-based order.

They wouldn't, of course, because it's strongly mnemonic. You may know  
that Javanese does the same: it has a Sanskrit order alongside a poem:

Hana caraka,
data sawala
padha jayanya
maga bathanga

'There were two messengers, they didn't like each other, they were  
both very powerful, here are the corpses.'

For the African syllabaries now entering the digital world, we have to  
at least try to ensure that the ordering makes some kind of sense.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/



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