05-02-2018, 10:49 PM
Torsten: no, I'm saying that many properties of a spelling system, whether governed by rigid rules or not, are independent from human natural language. There is no intrinsic reason to ancient Egyptian why it should be written in hieroglyphs. This happened because of historical reasons.
Korean is spelled by forming a square out of each syllable. Arabic is spelled with omission of vowels and right to left. And those are just modern, well known examples.
What I'm getting at is that we are looking at a spelling system (with or without intentional obscurity), not an actual natural language. You can't write down a language, there is always human mediation, and that's where strange things can happen, which are not necessarily reflected in the spoken form of the language.
Korean is spelled by forming a square out of each syllable. Arabic is spelled with omission of vowels and right to left. And those are just modern, well known examples.
What I'm getting at is that we are looking at a spelling system (with or without intentional obscurity), not an actual natural language. You can't write down a language, there is always human mediation, and that's where strange things can happen, which are not necessarily reflected in the spoken form of the language.