Triangles! Triangles Everywhere!

Agsin and again I am drawn back to the aesthetic appeal of  Ditema tsa Dinoko, also known as Isbheqe Sohlamvu. A good aesthetic is an excellent tool for promotion and its overlay of the IPA chart on the indigenous symbols assures me that this is a result of international syncretism. The iconography is sufficiently simple to allow combinations of sounds and (where appropriate) to compose syllable clusters, which the eye and mind of native speakers can process as a word. The extensive system of prefixes and suffixes in Bantu languages no doubt facilitates this process. It would be fascinating to see a study on the relative speed of comprehension for Ditema tsa Dinoko versus Roman orthography.

There are, however, two questions that come to mind. The first is that of the order of the syllables in the visual medium. If the syllables fit more harmoniously in a non-concatenative order, it is sensible to order them in such a way; but there must be some sequences whoch could be reade in more than order, even if the noun class prefix is clear from the surrounding context. The second question is not so much a question as an observation. Direma tsa Dinoko, along with Mandombe and other African and indigenous scripts, depend on rotational symmetry. Although the reduction of shapes simplifies the number of design components needed to create the specialized font, quite a few persons have difficulty with rotation and reversal, especially when the orthography is so heavily dependent on these processes. Perhaps it is a challenge overcome by practice, but this challenge illustrates the conflict between simplicity of composition and simplicity of comprehension.

Beginner's Assyrian

My New Year's resolution is preceeding in fits and starts (sometimes precipitated by my absent-minded professor habit of forgetting where my books are, and sometimes by the plethora of projects on which I am working) but I have begun Beginners' Assyrian, trusting in the similarities to Biblical Hebrew to give me a leg up, not under any illusion that the differences would present challenges.

The first challenge, of course, was the gross mismatch between the radical-based Semitic morphology of the Assyrian language and the determinative- and syllable-based orthography of cuneiform. One of the motivations for the adoption, if not creation, of the Semitic writing system (I suspect) was this mismatch. It was as if the problem with English transcription and translation in both Chinese and Japanese were combined!

The second challenge was the Assyrian reduction of the proto-Semitic consonants under the influence of Sumerian, which possessed a radically different morphology. I had thought the non-pronounciation of 'aleph and 'ayin in Modern Hebrew (which I had been using as my model for pronouncing Biblical Hebrew) created enough difficulties. Assyrian, on the other hand, witnessed the collapse of six proto-Semitic consonants (and waw) into near-indistinguishable phonological effects. Since Assyrian is a Semitic language, however, the tridical structure applies, even if two of the consonants are so weak as so to disappear entirely!

The third challenge was the tendency towards vowel harmony in Assyrian, which appeared also in its sister dialect of Babylonian. Sumerian had vowel harmony, possibly mitigated by tonal differences, but even Hebrew shows evidence of morphologically-specific vowel harmony. Babylonian was the language that replaced Sumerian in that language's ancient heartland, aand thus experienced the greatest level of vowel harmony (although not to the extent that it destroyed the typical Semitic structure), and Hebrew experienced a very low level, but the effect on Assyrian lay between the two. One has to wonder how much of the vowel harmony within the Assyrian Empire was the result of the infamous deportation policies, which mixed many tribes who spoke similar Semitic tongues; thus they shared structural similarities but not necessarily vowels.