On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 11:24 PM, Timothy Collinson <timothy.collinson@port.ac.uk> wrote:

<grin>

One of the great things about having bothered to learnt the Cyrillic alphabet when at college is that now with a tiny bit of Czech (which uses the Roman alphabet so is a bit easier) I get a bit of an 'in' into Russian without much extra effort. I'm all for short cuts me....

One day I probably ought to actually learn that Vilani alphabet. I wonder how many 'related' Known Universe languages that would give a bit of an aid to learning. (And yes, I know I've mixed language and alphabet in that thought, but i think you know what I mean!)

You mean Bilandin? I always saw that as a hybrid script, seeing as it kept the 26 character Latin alphabet. Actual written Vilani is going to be far more complex, due to needing to add tonal marks. It could well be that written Vilani is like Chinese, logosyllabic, with each character representing a syllable or word. Each syllable would have six tonal variations. Like Chinese, the written language would be universal.

They'd probably even have the same Traditional and Simplified distinctions.

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Douglas Berry
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