Hallo conlangers!

On Friday 25 November 2011 09:37:43 R A Brown wrote:

> On 24/11/2011 22:24, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo!
> 
> > On Thu, 24 Nov 2011 20:47:57 +0000 R A Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> [Okamoto] clearly would not have been interested in
> >> Shwa's gaits.
> > 
> > He would not have been interested in Shwa because there
> > are no Shwa typewriters ;)  Whether it is featural or not
> > would not have mattered to him at all, I think.
> 
> Oh yes it would: "....there is no troublesome need to make
> some pronunciation by combining a consonant with a vowel."
> 
> He did not even want the featural aspect of an abugida.

I see.  So he did not see a point in representing units
smaller than the syllable in script - hence a syllabary
and not an alphabet or abugida.

> [snip]
> 
> > Right.  The grapheme/phoneme relation is arbitrary.
> > 
> >> The Brx script is a true syllabary.  Shwa can never be
> >> a true syllabary because it is featural.
> > 
> > If you include the arbitrariness of the grapheme/phoneme
> > relation into the definition of "syllabary", then indeed
> > not. I'd rather consider abugidas a subset of
> > syllabaries,
> 
> That seems to me like calling both true alphabets, abjads
> (and often abugidas) "alphabets", as is popularly done.

I have even come across the term "syllabic alphabet" several
times, sometimes referring to abugidas, sometimes to plain old
syllabaries such as the Japanese kana syllabaries!

Of course, in *formal language theory*, the word _alphabet_
is used in a much, much more abstract sense, but that does
not concern us here.

>        I
> understand _syllabary_ to denote a writing system where the
> basic symbols is a syllabogram, i.e. the symbol itself, as
> e.g in hiragana, katakana and Linear B (and, presumably,
> Linear A) denotes a whole syllable and cannot be broken down
> into smaller phone*ic units.

Yes.  How you classify abugidas is a matter of what one
considers the "basic symbols", but arguably, the syllabograms
are *not* the basic symbols in an abugida - because they can
be broken up into consonant and vowel symbols.  In that way,
an abugida is closer to an alphabet than to a "true" syllabary.
 
> > namely those where the grapheme/phoneme relationship is
> > not arbitrary. All featural syllabaries are abugidas.
> 
> If you have syllables denoted by featural symbols then you
> must have an abugida.

Sure.

> ===========================================================
> 
> On 25/11/2011 01:18, Garth Wallace wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> > Okay, I'm a little confused by this discussion. I was
> > under the impression that an abugida was a writing
> > system that worked like Devanagari and closely related
> > scripts, in which each non-diacritic glyph stands for a
> > consonant followed by the inherent vowel of the script,
> > and different vowels or a lack of a following vowel are
> > marked with diacritics.
> 
> But as the word "abugida" is of Ethiopian origin and
> referred to the so-called "Ge'ez alphabet", it seems to me
> rather odd to restrict it just to the writing systems of a
> an Asian subcontinent.

Indeed.  The word could not have originated in India, as they
don't have the /? b g d .../ ordering of letters underlying
this at all.  They sort the letters by phonological criteria.
Using it in a way that doesn't apply to the Ethiopian script
would be perverse.
 
> The term was coined by Peter T. Daniels in his 1990 typology
> of writing systems.  He used the word abugida to mean a
> system where each unit is based on a consonant letter, and
> vowel notation is obligatory but secondary; it
> contrasts with a syllabary, where letters with shared
> consonants or vowels show no particular resemblance to each
> another, and with an alphabet proper, where independent
> letters are used to denote both consonants and vowels.
> 
> > Hangul's not an abugida at all, since it has both
> > consonant and vowel symbols and both are obligatory.
> 
> They are also in Ethiopian abugidas    :)

Hangul is somewhat different from Ethiopian and the South Asian
abugidas in that it does not consist of a string of consonant
symbols to which vowel diacritics are added; it has consonant
and vowel symbols which are grouped by syllables.  The question
whether it is an abugida is one of definition.
 
> > It's more like an alphabet squished into syllable
> > blocks.
> 
> Yep.

Exactly that is Hangul - a featural alphabet squished into
syllable blocks.
 
> The Indic scripts do differ from the Ethiopian abugida in
> that the basic consonant symbols denote consonant followed
> by inherent /a/, and the symbols for V symbols are, in
> effect, alphabetic.  The term  _alphasyllabary_ is often
> used to denote the Indic scripts as they share alphabetic
> features with that of a syllabary, in the broadest sense of
> the word.

Right.  They function a bit differently from Ethiopian, but
similar enough to classify them as abugidas, as is usually
done.

> > A featural syllabary would be a writing system where
> > there are systematic resemblances between symbols for
> > syllables with certain features in common, yet these
> > symbols cannot be decomposed into distinct obligatory
> > consonant and vowel symbols (which would make it
> > alphabetic).
> 
> By your definition, the Ethiopian abugida becomes an alphabet!!

And so do the South Asian scripts, and Hangul anyway.
 
> > The only writing system I know of that fits is Canadian
> > Aboriginal Syllabics, where the consonant is shown by the
> > shape of the glyph and the vowel by its orientation.
> 
> Yes, that's why people like me - and I am certainly not
> alone in this - classify Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics as an
> abugida.   :)

Yes, it can be considered an abugida, at least with equal
justification as Hangul.
 
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