Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 January 6

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January 6

Superior script

Has the inferiority or superiority of scripts, writing systems or alphabets ever been measured by an academic sources. Specifically I'm referring to ease of learning, distinguishability etc? Grootwoord (talk) 09:08, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

The thing is deciding your criteria. Do you want it to represent every sound ? Do you want it to be quick to write? Do you want it to be easy to read at a distance or in small print? Does aesthetic look have any impact? A lot of these are contradictory; cursive scripts can be written fast, but are less readable at a distance. -- Q Chris (talk) 09:54, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I personally think the Arabic script is inferior to the Latin script (I can read both). The reason is that you can't know the pronunciation of shorter Arabic vowels without diacretic marks, which are non-standard. This means that much Arabic pronunciation knowledge comes through memorization. I find this awful. For example, I don't speak French, but I have a decent knowledge of how to pronounce words since vowels are not guesswork; its there. I guess I was hoping there would be some comparison article perhaps titled "Comparison of writing systems" or something like that. Grootwoord (talk) 12:35, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

The Arabic script omits certain vowels because those are unnecessary for native speakers of Arabic. It's not really fair to compare the Latin and Arabic scripts without taking into account the languages they are designed for. The original (Hebrew/Phoenician) alphabet, from which nearly all others are derived, was made specifically for Semitic languages, which are based on consonantal roots, and in which vowels are less important for conveying meaning. Arabic script would not be very suitable to write Germanic languages like English, but is perfectly fine for Arabic. Of course if you speak English, you know that it too depends a lot on memorization for its pronunciation, which is far from phonetic. Just learning the English alphabet will not enable one to pronounce the words correctly. - Lindert (talk) 13:18, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Maybe my bias comes from the fact that my first language is (was?) Dutch. Dutch is probably one of the least phonetic languages. So I'm probably using that as a standard. Grootwoord (talk) 13:27, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

The fact that a literate adult can more or less get by without them does not mean that the lack of vowel marks does not give trouble even to native speakers.

Btw the idea of writing only consonants came from Egypt. Egyptian (and other Afro-Asiatic families like Berber) is also based on three consonant roots. An article about "Afro-Asiatic roots" seems to make more sense than one just about "Semitic roots". Semitic shares that phenomenon with other branches of AA. Since it is not a Semitic innovation this seems to be an artificial distinction not warranted methodologically. But to get back to the idea of consonantal writing, maybe the ideographic step (and thus Egyptian) was essential for that idea to become established. If so it is not a case of "vowels are not that important so let's just not write them". Contact Basemetal here 15:10, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

When judging any script solely as a script one should limit oneself to determining how fast the shapes of the letters can be learned and associated with their value, and how easy they are to distinguish once learned. How well or how completely it records any given language is a separate issue. Contact Basemetal here 13:53, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

• We actually had this discussion one day in Russian 101. I mentioned how clumsy all the vertically-stroked letters of Cyrillic were in comparison to the Latin script (which scandalized the professor), and suggested that Greek script was superior to both in having the most distinctive letters, with perhaps the exceptions of ψ & φ. We have had this discussion here at the RD before, if someone can look it up in the archives, but I have never come acrost a source worth quoting on the subject. μηδείς (talk) 03:09, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
  • @Medeis: Have you ever seen a Greek-language wet floor sign reading Υγρό Δάπεδο and noticed the high level of indistinctiveness between the first and the second letter, an uppercase ypsilon and a lowercase gamma respectively? --Theurgist (talk) 22:52, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
    • Yes, certainly, I would point out that α ο σ /γ ν υ / η μ and φ θ φ can be mistaken, especially depending on the font. But I think that's far less a problem than you find with Cyrillic or even Latin. Having studied and read the Gospels and some of the Anabasis [typeset] in Ancient/Koine Greek, I don't find it nearly as hard to decipher as Latin or Cyrillic handwriting. Again, this is really an issue for a study. μηδείς (talk) 01:11, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
      • @Medeis: I agree if you speak from the point of view of a study. The Greek letters are more distinctive and it is less easy to confuse them by a novice. However, a Greek text due to its handwriting-like nature does not "keep the line". I prefer more neat, upright, sharpened, polished and accurate writings such as Latin or Cyrillic, and even Hebrew and Armenian (however, the latter is a real champion of monotony and indistinctiveness). Apart from Greek, the Georgian letters are also somewhat distinctive.
        But I would not agree that the Greek handwriting is more distinctive then the Latin or Greek ones, just try to read such a thing [1], it is like chicken scratches and I saw many of much worse examples! By the way, when I complain about modern Greek typefaces, I mean that they resemble too much those ancient scratches.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk)
      • Here are a collection of examples of the Greek handwritten alphabet in the wild. Except for some accurate speciments [2], much of them are realy painful to read. I bet you won't say such things [3][4][5] are distinctive and readable! Obvioulsly, the later Greek Uncial [6], from which Cyrillic came, is more readable and pleasant, but it died out because it required more accurate and patient work from a scribe, it is always easier and faster to write incomprehensible scratches! --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:36, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
        • I have only been considering typeset books, User:Любослов Езыкин, not handwritten manuscripts, hence, perhaps, some of the misconfusion. μηδείς (talk) 17:48, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
          • @Medeis: Ah, yes, you are right. I've misunderstood that you "don't find it [Greek handwriting] nearly as hard to decipher as Latin or Cyrillic handwriting". Anyway, I hope my links might be useful. It is not fair to compare Greek typefaces and Latin/Cyrillic handwriting. It is proper to compare Greek typefaces with Latin/Cyrillic cursive/script typefaces (the like I showed you below), from one side, and Greek handwriting with Latin/Cyrillic handwriting, from another side. In the first case Latin/Cyrillic cursive typefaces are no less readable, but in the second case I would not say for sure that Greek is more readable, quite the contrary. But if we are speaking about typefaces, here [7] is a brief history where some specimens of the earlier Greek typefaces can be seen, they obviously directly came from handwriting, I would say those books were printed with handwriting. From an aesthetic point of view they are beautiful, but their legibility is disputable. Modern Greek typefaces are more restrained, they all look like Greek versions of Monotype Corsiva.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:11, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
  • Like it was then I will repeat that you have a very obvious Latino-centric prejudices. Your dislike of the outward appearance of Cyrillic is a purely matter of subjective taste, not scientific. It is not personally about you, I've heard such "arguments" from dozens of people, from both sides, the natives of the Latin alphabet and the natives of the Cyrillic one, both used such "arguments" for de-Cyrillization and Romanization. But I can reassure you that >200 million people who use Cyrillic natively have never had a thought that the lack of explicit distinction between upper and lower-case letters cause ANY trouble for readability. Any at all. If some learners at Russian 101 level confuse the letters from a very refined alphabet such as Cyrillic, but blame not himself but the alphabet, that means that they are just simply dumb stupid Amer do not know alphabet well. Do not think, I idealize Cyrillic, sometimes I'm myself dream about Romanization of Russian in an alternative historical world and I somewhat envy Western Slavs, because the Latin alphabet literally rules the world and I sometimes tired of switching the keyboard layouts, but I understand that Cyrillic is very good and very suitable for Russian (I would not vote for other languages) alphabet and looks OK. It's even better than Latin as strings of Cyrillic text fit accurately in a line, that makes Cyrillic techno-looking.
    As for Greek, I'm myself fond of Greek, but still I must admit I dislike those pseudo-handwritten Greek typefaces. For me (just my opinion) it make an impression of a very untidy and unrefined script. Like someone did not bother himself in creating good Greek typefaces, but lazily transplanted Greek handwriting into books. Cyrillic, even without the explicit lower-uppercase distinction, is much better. Do not forget, modern Cyrillic mimics Latin practically in every way, so the differences in their aesthetics is in fact minute. 𝓑𝓾𝓽 𝓖𝓻𝓮𝓮𝓴 𝓽𝔂𝓹𝓮𝓯𝓪𝓬𝓮𝓼 𝓵𝓸𝓸𝓴 𝓵𝓲𝓴𝓮 𝔀𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓲𝓷 𝓛𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓷 𝓲𝓷 𝓼𝓾𝓬𝓱 𝓪 𝓶𝓪𝓷𝓷𝓮𝓻. 𝓓𝓸 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓬𝓸𝓷𝓼𝓲𝓭𝓮𝓻 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓼 𝓶𝓸𝓻𝓮 𝓹𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓼𝓪𝓷𝓽 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓷 𝓪𝓷 𝓪𝓿𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓰𝓮 𝓛𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓷 𝓽𝔂𝓹𝓮𝓯𝓪𝓬𝓮?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:09, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
    • The OP specifically asked about the distinguishability of the alphabets, and that's what I addressed. It has nothing to with what I personally find pleasant. I am not sure why one should think that α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω looks like bold and ligatured handwriting. In any case, a study on distinguishabiliity would be interesting. μηδείς (talk) 18:20, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
      • Because if the modern uppercase Greek letters (like the Latin ones) came from the inscriptional alphabets, the lowercase Greek letters came directly from the Greek handwriting. But if the Latin lowercase typeface letters, which also came from the humanist Latin handwriting, became apparantly different from handwriting, the Greek alphabet did not go through such development. A Greek text in a Greek typeface looks like it was written by hand. If you like to read books in handwriting, it is OK then.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:46, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
• Geoffrey Sampson's short book Writing Systems (1985) attempts to cover the objective advantages and disadvantages of various orthographies. —Tamfang (talk) 03:48, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Tamfang, I enjoyed the interview of the author at the link you posted. I am surprised how Americanized their voices sounded, though. μηδείς (talk) 18:19, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

What link? All I got is a WP article. Contact Basemetal here 21:02, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Beat me to it. —Tamfang (talk) 22:19, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

The external link to Sampson's website. Jimminy Cricket, must we Yanks do all your work for you Limeys? μηδείς (talk) 02:23, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

You could have asked a Mexican. Contact Basemetal here 22:37, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

The original (Hebrew/Phoenician) alphabet, from which nearly all others are derived, was made specifically for Semitic languages, which are based on consonantal roots, and in which vowels are less important for conveying meaning. Arabic script ... is perfectly fine for Arabic.
— User:Lindert

It is a well-known and very persistent popular misconseption. It confuses the cause and the rationale. Not that vowels in Semitic languages are less important, so Semitic alphabets have not been using them. On the contrary, in fact it is backward: people perfectly know the obvious deficiencies of the traditional Semitic alphabets, but can do nothing about that because the bad traditions are as diffucult to uproot as the good ones (though in fact many do not wait for romanization, which could never happen, and override this simply by writing Arabic with the spontaneous Arabic chat alphabet, which always causes a rage from the "our-great-Islamic-traditions-are-better-than-that-Western-depravity" mob), so the speakers rationalize the problem with this "consonants matter, short vowels don't" stuff. It is like the fox from the fable who explained his failure in getting the grapes by the rationale that he did not need them. Short vowels in Semitics are as important as in any languages. A great deal of Arabic grammar and semantics are expressed with those unwritten vowels. People who write with that chat alphabet do not rush to skip the vowels, the Maltese have never even thought about such bad economy of the letters, and the Lebanese who wrote such newspapers did not ignore the vowels as well. I might also mention Ethiopians and their funky alphabet which uses vowels explicitly. No, the Phoenician alphabet lacks vowels not because its unknown creator was a pro in Semitic studies and bore in mind the three-consonantal root structure, but because all inventions in the earlier stages are always rough and undercooked. The modern Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac alphabets are like alphabetic Neanderthals living along with the more developed and advanced Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, Indic, Ge'ez and many other alphabets. I always consider Arabic orthographies (of Arabic or other Middle Eastern languages) to be semi-hieroglyphic. It requires much of unnecessary memorization and guesswork to read in the Arabic script.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:23, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Maybe you're right, you clearly seem to know your stuff. But aren't you exaggerating a little ('alphabetic Neanderthals')? It's perfectly possible to write with full vowels in Hebrew and Arabic. Arabic already uses plenty of diacritics even to distinguish between consonants and Hebrew had a fully developed vowel system ready to use when the language was revived. And yet people chose not to use these vowel signs. Now I read only a little Hebrew and next to no Arabic, so I can't relate to native speakers, but surely Arabs and Israeli have seriously thought about this? I find it nearly impossible to read English or my native language (Dutch) with just consonants, yet Semitic peoples apparently are able to do this. Anyway, I appreciate your insights. - Lindert (talk) 23:58, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't know Arabic fluently (and to be honest my Arabic is getting worse as the years go by), but Luboslov's assessment of the Arabic script is basically the same as his complaint about those who complain about Cyrillic. It works just fine for millions of people. If it was necessary to write the vowels, they would write the vowels. I actually think the vowel signs are a distraction, on the rare occasions that you do see them. There's almost no ambiguity, and when there is ambiguity, context will easily sort it out - for example, "كتب" without vowel markings could be "kataba" ("he wrote") or "kutub" ("books"), but there is no chance those words would be confused in context. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:59, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

It cannot be compared with Cyrillic as Cyrillic is a very refined alphabet (I even won't be shy to say it is one of the most refined), and it shows, at least for the Slavic languages which use Cyrillic, perfectly everything in a language that is needed to be shown. Moreover, the complains are purely of aesthetic subjective taste, some Westerners, who got accustomed only to the look of Latin or who are most probably lazy or has an attitude against any non-Latin alphabets, claim that Cyrillic is badly looking, has bad readability and so on subjective nonsense. It should be known that since around 1700 the Cyrillic aesthetics is directly derived from the Latin one. There are no such similar alphabets like these two.

Second, I never claimed that the Arabic alphabet is ugly or something. Aesthetically it is quite beautiful, though its readability due its geometric shapes leaves much to be desired (and we cannot make a comparison here with the Cyrillic/Latin case, which are twin alphabets, their look and readability is more or less equal). But my complains were about backwardness and underrefinement of the Arabic (as well as Hebrew) alphabet. It is hardly arguable that they two bear much more similarities with their ancient ancestor (the Phoenician alphabet), while both Latin and Cyrillic have made much more upgrades and improvements. The Arabic alphabet even has in fact less letter-shapes than the letters postulated, and half the letters are differentiated with mere dots here and there (and these dots easily get lost). That Arabs themselves write with the Latin alphabet when the Arabic language purity mob is not watching them. The "millions cannot be mistaken" argument does not work here, the bad habits are hard to eradicate, people there wrote with thousand hieroglyphs and cuneiforms for thousand years after all, it does not mean that those writing systems were good. "Millions use this" does not mean millions like this, but rather millions have learnt to stand this, like they have learnt to stand sand storms and +50 °C.

But the Arabic alphabet might be not so bad after all, if the Arabic spelling were better. It may represent semi-artificial Standard Arabic more or less, but every Arab knows that it cannot represent any spoken Arabic at all, this is why they write with Latin in any informal situation. Not to mention that the Arabic alphabet with the Arabic spelling methods cannot represent any language except for Standard Arabic itself. When it is used anyway, it creates thousand spelling rebuses that must be memorized and then guessworked everythime for languages such as Persian or Urdu. At least the Arabic spelling is not hopeless. Uyghurs have hacked it and write every their sound with different Arabic letters, and I only can praise such a progressive approach.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:25, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Conversely, Yiddish, which is an Indo - European Language, uses the square letters, which are Semitic. 86.149.13.55 (talk) 17:17, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

How did you beat the snipers? Contact Basemetal here 22:37, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Exactly, Yiddish hacked the Hebrew alphabet and freely uses its consonants as full-fledged vowels. After that the Hebrew alphabet is not so hopeless and more or less bearable (of course, if we ignore the monotony of the square characters).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:06, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I am sceptical of both the "all inventions in the earlier stages are always rough and undercooked" "theory" and the "Semites like to write in consonants because they don't care about vowels" "theory". No one seems to have noticed but I stated above that the idea of writing "in consonants" came from Egyptian and that a reasonable explanation requires taking into account that originally the phonetics were an auxiliary system to an logographic system. The phonetic value was derived through the rebus principle. The fact that the phonetic value of a sign consisted solely of consonants had nothing to do with the Egyptians supposedly not caring about their (short) vowels. It is simply a result of a simple and very basic fact of Egyptian grammar: just like in the Semitic language the invariant part of a word is a three consonant root. So it only made any sense to extract from a logogram through the rebus principle that part of the phonetics of that logogram that did not vary from form to form and derived word to derived word, in other words its three consonant root. If you need a more concrete example, how about this: when the Egyptians extracted through the rebus principle from the logogram which stands for a word whose three consonant root is nfr and whose meaning is 'beautiful' (see wikt:nfr, Wiktionary Foreign Word of the Day 13/01/2016) the purely phonetic value nfr without regard for the meaning it wasn't because they didn't care about its vowels. It was because the only part of that Egyptian word that does not vary is precisely its three consonant skeleton. The vowels may depend upon the specific form or derivation. So didn't make any sense to include vowels in the phonetic value. They couldn't have done it any other way. So it is not that "all inventions in the earlier stages are always rough and undercooked". It's that that how the rebus principle will work and can only work for a language whose vocabulary is based on three consonant roots. The Egyptian 24 letter "alphabet" was in turn derived from the phonetic value of the hieroglyphs through the acrophonic principle and gave us the first example of a consonantal alphabet (abjad). Don't wanna believe me? Your loss. Contact Basemetal here 22:37, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

You forgot about the Coptic alphabet which is 1700 years old, and you forgot that Ancient Egyptian phonetics has been reconstructed mainly from that phonemic Egyptian alphabet. If not that alphabet our understanding of Ancient Egyptian phonetics were no better than of Sumerian and you certainly would not get that 24 letter "alphabet". The lack of vowels in the reconstructed transcription is a result of the lack of information about Ancient Egyptian phonetics and no more. So if we are not sure what vowels Ancient Egyptian said, better not to write them. So, no, I won't believe you. Any Semitic language needs vowels as well. Consonantal writing is deficient. Ask any Arabs why they do not leave vowels while chatting with the chat alphabet.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 01:07, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Because they're using the Latin alphabet, where the vowels are necessary. They also use numbers in chatspeak to represent Arabic letters. This argument is nonsensical. Is it even possible to send an SMS in Arabic? Adam Bishop (talk) 01:23, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

I've never sent an SMS in Arabic, but since some older cellphones, I have had in possesion, had an Arabic input, and practically all modern smartphones with Android have an Arabic keyboard layout, I believe there has been no technical limitation for Arabic SMS for the past 10-15 years (apart from the limitation that they must be only 70-characters long). But still, as some studies show, many young Arabs chat with the Latin alphabet, and they use vowels[8], because they take an opportunity, which the Latin alphabet gives them, to represent their spoken language in full. The fact, that the Latin alphabet has vowels, does not oblige anybody to use them. If, as it has been stated here, vowels are of less importance in Semitic languages, why do Arabs (and Jews, I suppose) spell them out and waste the precious 160-character space?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:54, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

You either did not read or did not understand what I was saying. Basically not a single one of your statements deals with anything I said and every one of them deals with things I did not say. How does your mention of the Coptic alphabet have any relevance whatsoever? The Coptic alphabet was not derived from a native Egyptian logographic system through the rebus principle. My whole and only point was that when deriving phonetics from logograms representing words of a language such as Egyptian through the rebus principle you can only arrive at a consonantal system because what stays permanently associated with the word are the cosonants whereas the vowels vary. Your argument is instead that "all inventions in the earlier stages are always rough and undercooked". Ok. I've now expressed my point as clearly and succinctly as I possibly could and I'll just let people judge the merits of the respective arguments and leave it at that. Contact Basemetal here 16:04, 9 January 2016 (UTC) PS: Just in case you have forgotten (or never knew) how the rebus principle is supposed to work in the context of Egyptian hyeroglyphs here is a demonstration you might enjoy. You shouldn't skip anything, but if you must, the hieroglyphs and the rebus principle are demonstrated 3:17 minutes into the video. Contact Basemetal here 17:52, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

My answer may be not to the point just because I do not fully understand what is your implied connection between the Middle Eastern consonant alphabets, the Semitic word structure and the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Frankly, I have not been any interested in any hieroglyphic writing, so I'm not eager to spend my time and read it now how it works, especially because there a big chance that I forget quickly such an unpractical and uninteresting for me information. Anyway, I made a supposition that the lack of the vowels in the reconstructed transcription of Ancient Egyptian is a result of the lack of information about phonetics of the language (it much depends on not so reliable Coptic, as I understand), so linguists and Egyptologists just leave the vowels, as it is better to write nothing than speculate without grounds. If you imply that the Middle Eastern alphabets inherit their only consonantal nature from the Egyptian hieroglyphics, then even in such a case or, maybe, especially in such a case I will stand that this only consonantal nature is a backward atavism comparing to other alphabets.

And I hope you understand that I was not trying to change somebody's view or agitate for Romanization (maybe, just a very little bit...). I've just expressed my thoughts on the matter. I understand that our discussion is purely theoretical and Middle Eastern people will continue to use their alphabets (whatever those are). I thank you and everybody for the discussion, it has been a pleasure.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:50, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I never disagreed on that point. In fact at the top you'll find I was the first to suggest: "The fact that a literate adult can more or less get by without them [vowel marks] does not mean that the lack of vowel marks does not give some trouble even to native speakers".

The only thing I was trying to add was that not only is the persistence of consonantal alphabets among speakers of Semitic languages no proof they are the best fit (rather it is most probably a case of cultural inertia) but even implying the grammatical structure of Semitic languages would necessarily lead to the creation of such a system is questionable.

I did suggest the concept of consonantal writing was most probably passed from the Egyptians to the Western Semits. I believe all those who consider the Proto-Sinaitic script to be the first and the common origin of all Western Semitic consonantl alphabets mostly agree on that point. The geographical proximity and structural similarity (the use of iconic signs and of the acrophonic principle) are just too numerous. But I do not believe it is entirely correct to say (as the infobox of that article does) the Proto-Sinaitic script derives from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The concept was borrowed but while the actual shapes of the letters may do not correspond the respective phonetic values of the corresponding signs do not.

Regarding the transcription of Egyptian: only consonants are used because the vowels are not known, but the vowels are not known for the very reason that the phonetic part of that writing system is consonant based.

One more piece of data showing even in Semitic languages the lack of vowel marks can be felt to be a problem even by native speakers: the Ge'ez script derived from the South Arabian alphabet for the Semitic Ge'ez language was an abjad until about the 4th century but became an abugida after that time, when the vowel marks were made permanent. It is difficult to imagine the speakers of Ge'ez, a Semitic language, would have bothered, if it didn't make any difference.

Less decisive: Akkadian speakers used, throughout their history, the cuneiform writing system, in which the phonetic part is syllabic. Clearly that is due to the fact the system was designed for Sumerian in which the lexemes are syllables, not discontinuous consonant roots. But there was never any attempt in Akkadian to push the phonetics of cuneiform in the direction of a consonantal system.

There ought to be a phrase meaning "to keep saying goodbye and never actually leave" to mirror the "French leave" which means exactly the opposite. Whatever it is called, I felt had to come back clear up this misunderstanding.

Contact Basemetal here 18:21, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

International Phonetic Alphabet

how many symbols are there in IPA?--80.117.217.205 (talk) 15:45, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

P.S. sorry, the answer is in the article, there are 107 letters, 52 diacritics,but how many phones and phonemes are there?--80.117.217.205 (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

That's not answerable. As for numbers of phonemes, they can only be counted within each language. Since there is no real sense in which any one phoneme in one language could be called "the same" or "different" to one in some other language, there is no way one could pool these counts into a total. As for phones, phones differ from each other by gradual, non-categorial criteria, so again there is no way one could count "how many" there are. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:59, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

To add to what Fut. Perf. says, a phoneme is defined as "one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language". The /p/ in English "spin" and "pin" is a single phoneme in English even though one is pronounced [p] and the other [pʰ]. (See allophone). In other languages, such as Thai or Khmer, /p/ and /pʰ/ contrast, making them two phonemes. What counts as a phoneme differs in each language so there's no answer to that part of your question. As for phones, the number is theoretically infinite. Take vowels, for instance. Think of /e/ as a number line with /i/ at one end and /ɛ/ at the other. The [e] of one language is slightly higher (towards [i]) or slightly lower [towards [ɛ]) than the [e] of another language. Just in this one vowel there is theoretically an infinite amount of possible sounds. Although, practically it is limited by our perceptual abilities, there are still so many that nobody could count them all or even be aware of them all.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 04:39, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

As it was said above, the question can be hardly answered. Even if we can't get a list of all phones, however, we can estimate the number of phonemes. A database of 451 languages lists 919 different segments, but a great deal of them is used by a very small amount of languages (a good example of so called Zipf's law). So we could estimate that the number of phonemes that are employed in the real world in the remaining ~6500 languages must be around one or two thousand, most of them would be used very rarely.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:23, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

It's not even as simple as looking at the same language; there are dialectical difference within a language: In English you have such issues like the Caught-cot merger, which is preserved in some dialects and not present in others, meaning that for some English speakers, those words have different phonemes, and for others they do not. --Jayron32 16:33, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Some kinds of phones/phonemes (like diphthongs or affricates or aspirated consonants) are represented with the IPA with more than one symbol, or with a symbol and a diacritic. Some phones/phonemes may be alternatively represented in multiple ways, depending on convention. --Theurgist (talk) 01:57, 11 January 2016 (UTC)