* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| The potential for confusion should be quite obvious. B&D does
| contain descriptions of some proposed types of scripts, but these
| descriptions are so brief that they can be interpreted in any number
| of ways. Their application within B&D by the various authors is also
| inconsistent.

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| Did you look at the article where they were introduced? (In Downing,
| Lima, and Noonan 1992.)

No. I've just read B&D, nothing else. What do you mean that this is
the article where "they" were introduced? How can all these types be
introduced there if you invented one of them, and Bright another?

In short, I'm a bit confused about why you point to this particular
article.

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| - what type of script is Hangul?

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| "Featural."

Maybe. The question is, what does that mean? Do we have a definition
of the "featural" class that is good enough that we can look at other
scripts and tell whether or not they too are featural?

I know the definition says that the character shapes "correlate with
distinctive features of the segments of the language", but I have only
the faintest idea what that means. What are "segments"? Is it a
recognized linguistic term? And what are these "features"? Is this a
linguistic term, or does it just mean "feature" in the dictionary sense?

In short, what is a featural script?

| Which does not, however, mean it represents Jakobsonian distinctive
| features.

What are they? What is a good place to learn about them?

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| - what about Tengwar and Cree?

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| Cree is an abugida (taking one orientation as basic and the
| rotations as derivations, equivalent to adding a mark).

That's an answer that makes sense, but it does seem that the abugida
class needs a little stretching to make Cree fit into it. It doesn't
seem that the designers of Cree thought the characters had any
inherent vowel, but the "consistent modifications" are there.

What happens if you remove the requirement that abugida characters
must necessarily have an inherent vowel, and instead just say that the
characters are syllabic, with vowels (or lack of vowels) indicated in
a consistent way?

It seems to me that this makes Cree fit more naturally, but, of
course, it may be problematic for some reason.

| Tengwar has something to do with Tolkien but I don't know what.

See p. 582 of B&D, or <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/i18n/script.jsp?id=tengwar >.

| Is it the one that works like Shavian? Anyway, I don't recall any
| Tolkien script having an inherent unmarked vowel.

Tengwar is like an alphabet in that characters denote vowels and
consonants, but the vowels are written as diacritics. The shapes of
the characters are also designed to reflect their phonetic values.

So Tengwar has in it elements of the alphabet, the abugida, and the
featural script. The best match is perhaps to call it an alphabet.

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| - what is the type of scripts in the Brahmic script family?

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| Abugida, by definition

What? Is the definition of abugida "Brahmic-like script", or is it as
given in B&D?

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Various answers have floated around, and none are, I think, entirely
| satisfactory.

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| It's my term, so my use of it is definitive.

Certainly, but it doesn't mean that a well-designed typology for
scripts need necessarily include that term, or even use it as it was
defined by you.

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| I'll agree that the contenders for consistent typologies of scripts
| are few, but I'm not sure your proposal is the only one so far.
| You've hinted that you're dissatisfied with the term 'featural
| syllabary' that Kenneth Whistler proposed. Could you explain why?

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| If it's meant to be a separate type, it's objectionable for the same
| reason "alphasyllabary" is, namely, suggesting it's not a type but a
| hybrid.

Hmmmm. Then it seems that we have different criteria for what
constitutes a good typology. To me, a good typology is a set of
classes such that

a) each class is sufficiently well-defined that one can look at any
script and unambiguously determine whether or not the script is a
member of the class,

b) the definition of the each class obviously defines a way of
designing scripts, with no relation to any particular script,

b) all scripts have only one class, and

c) the definition of the classes teaches us something about the
nature of scripts and their relation to languages.

The difficulty here is not coming up with definitions of the
individual classes that make sense, but coming up with a set of
classes, a typology, that has the features above. So far I don't think
anyone has met this goal. Whether anyone has really tried is of course
another matter.

The labels stuck onto the different classes I am much less concerned
with. From my point of view an alphabet by any other name would smell
as sweet. Indeed, isn't "abugida" the Amharic term for the Amharic
script? And isn't Amharic a member of a different class? I don't
really care one way or the other, but if you consider the term
"alphasyllabary" objectionable, why is "abugida" acceptable?

--Lars M.