On 25/11/2011 22:24, Garth Wallace wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 1:05 PM, Jörg
> Rhiemeier<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>> Hallo conlangers!
>>
>> On Friday 25 November 2011 18:40:33 R A Brown wrote:
>>>
>>> Syllabaries such as the Japanese hiragana&  katakana
>>>  or the ancient Mycenaean Linear B are quite
>>> certainly not featural, period.
>>
>> Amen.
>
> Not 100% though! In kana, the dakuten is a symbol for a
> phonemic distinction (voicing of the consonant). ;)

I know about that - it's a diacritic!
================================================

On 25/11/2011 22:09, Garth Wallace wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 12:37 AM, R A Brown wrote:
>>
>> On 25/11/2011 01:18, Garth Wallace wrote: [snip]
[snip]
>>
>> 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.
>
> I never said it was restricted to the Asian subcontinent.
> I just said I thought it referred to writing systems LIKE
> those.

OK - sorry.

It's just that I have come across abugida confined to the
Indic scripts with their own peculiarities; e.g. unlike the
Ethiopian abugida, the Indic scripts show the different
vowels in syllables that are just V by different symbols as
in an alphabet; they are not shown by a 'zero consonant'
with the vowel marking of other consonants.

Also AIUI the Indic scripts show word final C by using a
diacritic with the -a series. AFAIK there's no counterpart
to this in the Ethiopian scripts.

> Granted, I can't read Amharic, but looking at a chart of
>  the glyphs arranged with consonant rows and vowel
> columns, the schwa-column syllabograms appear to be the
> most basic, and all of the other vowels appear to be
> marked by additions to the schwa-column glyphs, like
> added tails. There doesn't seem to be a distinct schwa
> element that can be separated from consonant elements;
> the different schwa-column syllabograms don't have that
> much in common with each other.

Yes, that's what the Wikipedia page seems to show.  But as
set out on the Omniglot page, the [a] column is the basic
one and the [ə] (shwa) column is a derived one. This is also
what Hans Jensen shows in "Sign, Symbol and Script" and what
is shown in "The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems"
by Florian Coulmas.

I guess what you mean is that an the basic series in an
abugida has an inherent vowel, namely /a/ (which may be
pronounced [ə], and that _other_ vowels will be shown by
adding marks to the basic symbols.

But even with this stricter definition above, the  Canadian
Aboriginal syllabics are an abugida in that one can consider
the -a series to be basic, and the -e, -i and -o series to
be formed transformations of the basic series.

But to me, the important difference is between those
syllable scripts where:
(a) all the glyphs are unique and not analyzable into C and V;
and:
(a) the glyphs are analyzable into a part which denotes the
consonant onset (or lack of onset) and a part denoting the
vocalic nucleus.

But if it is wished to restrict 'abugida' to a subset of (b)
in which the vowel nucleus is shown by a zero sign, then we
are left with what to call the superset (b).

[snip]
>>
>> 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.
>
> And the basic Ethiopian symbols don't denote consonant
> followed by inherent schwa?

What I meant is that the Indic vowels without any consonant
onset are shown by unrelated symbols as they are in an alphabet.

[snip]
>
> I thought a writing system that has distinct consonant
> and vowel symbols, with both obligatory, was an alphabet.
> Is that not true?

Not IMO if the consonant & vowel bits form a composite
symbol.  Even in the Indic & Ethiopian abugidas, the short
can be interpreted as a null symbol.

> It  sounds  like  if  you  set  syl la bles  a part from
> each  o ther,  say  by  put ting  spac es  be tween them,
> then  by  your  de fi ni tion  the  La tin  al pha bet
> would  be come  an  a bu gi da.

That, with respect, is just silly.  All you have done is
write a string of _discrete_ alphabetic symbols with
variable white space: narrow within syllables and wider at
the end of syllables or after punctuation marks.

BTW some Roman inscriptions did something similar 2000 years
ago: white spaces between letters, but dots at the end of
syllables.  But no AFAIK has ever suggested that made the
Latin script an abugida    ;)

By that sort of arguing one might just as well say that
English writing is polylogographic simply because we put
wider whiter space at the end of words (not even after
morphemes)!
==================================================

On 25/11/2011 21:05, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
[snip]
>
> Exactly.  And hence, an abugida is more like an alphabet
> than a syllabary, at least what regards the number of
> symbols to learn.  Devanagari, for instance, has 40
> consonant symbols and 18 vowel symbols; add to this some
> extra symbols such as visarga, anusvara, candrabindu
> etc.: altogether about 70 or 80 elements.  A true
> syllabary expressing the same vowels and consonants
> would have 40x18 = 720 different symbols for CV
> syllables, a much higher tax on memory!
>
[snip]
>
> Indeed not.  I think we can boil it down to:
>
> Logography: unitary glyphs for morphemes
> Syllabary: unitary glyphs for syllables
> Abugida: unitary glyphs for phonemes, grouped by syllables
> Abjad: unitary glyphs for consonants, linearly arranged
> Alphabet: unitary glyphs for phonemes, linearly arranged
> Featural abugida: glyphs for phonemes composed of elements
> representing phonemic features, grouped by syllables
> Featural alphabet: glyphs for phonemes composed of elements
> representing phonemic eatures, linearly arranged

I go along with most of that, except to observe that
designers of featural systems seem IME more often to be
concerned with phonetic features rather than phonemes.

> Yet, many scripts combine elements of two or more of the
> above.

Yes, indeed.
[snip]

> Indeed not.  Terms such as "alphabet", "syllabary",
> "abugida" etc. are bandied about with whatever
> definition the relevant author sees fit.  Some are used
> in misleading and contradictory ways in the popular
> press, as such examples as "Japanese syllabic alphabet"
> or "Chinese ideographs" show.

Exactly - that's why I attempted to make it clear how I was
using the terms. It was never my intention to be
prescriptive; I was just aiming at clarity.

> I have made a proposal above.

Indeed you have.

-- 
Ray
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Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
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