Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
I hope the two of you aren't just being nice! 
How could (or, rather, should) Hiragana be expanded to provide for additional syllables? Upon cursory inspection, I half get the sense that with a bit of effort Hiragana forms could be slightly more harmonized/standardized* (there already appear to be semi-regular correspondences between some related forms)... and additional syllables could be derived in a semi-systematic way.
Of course, doing it that way I shall (probably never) have the benefit of doing it with a proper font... only by hand. Is there a better way?
I think I could get by (to create a fairly phonetic [but still Hiragana-like] Hiragana syllabary for Hungarian) with as few as 126 syllables (as opposed to the 73 single character syllables listed by wikipedia), with the understanding that syllables containing long vowels are indicated by some sort of an accent (which I'm sure are called something else in Hiragana terms), and that vocalized consonantal syllables are systematically derivable from its unvocalized syllable counterpart.
i.e.: 7 vowels (in reality 7 short and 7 long) + 17 consonants (in reality these 17 just represent unvocalized consonants and ones that have no vocalization-wise opposite counterparts... the full total of consonants is 26).
- Ahi
Ps.: * Harmonized/standardized to perhaps make some additional already used Hiragana forms available for novel use. Though I could be way off. |
Ancient Japanese seemed to have 7 vowels. But in those days they transcribed it into Chinese characters with a similar sound. Hiragana and katakana did not exist then. The poems in the "Man'yoshu" seem to have this 7 vowel system.
However, have you thought of Korean? It is an agglutinative language and has a true alphabet with separate consonants and vowels. I love it because it is perfectly designed to express the Korean phonetic system. At the same time it looks like Chinese writing to people not used to East Asian scripts. It has at least 7 vowels if that is what you are looking for.