* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| To some extent that is true, but birds and bees have fundamental
| differences of a kind that I am not sure abugidas and syllabaries do.
| What fundamental difference do you see that keep abugidas and
| syllabaries so far apart that they are not even allowed a common
| supertype below 'script'?
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| Just as with the biological analogy, their ancestry is different.
So what? Even the scripts within the "abugida" class have different
ancestries.
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Do you really think that there is only one alphabet? If so, what is
| your response to the following statement:
|
| "Alphabet
|
| A type of writing system that denotes consonants and vowels with
| separate characters.
|
| There are 36 instances: Armenian, Asomtavruli, Avestan, Buryat,
| Carian, Cirth, Coptic script, Cyrillic, Deseret, Etruscan script,
| Georgian script, Geyinzi, Glagolithic, Gothic script, Greek, Latin
| script, Lycian, Lydian, Manchu, Mandaic script, Meroitic, Modern
| syriac, Mongolian clear script, Mongolian script, N'ko,
| Nusxa-xucuri, Ogham, Old Persian Cuneiform, Orkhon, Osmanya, Punic
| script, Runic, Shavian, Sidetic, Thaana, Utopian."
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| Who came up with the idiotic number 36?
The topic map engine. It's telling us that the particular database
it's looking at has 36 instances of this class, not that the class has
precisely 36 instances. The class is of course of potentially infinite
cardinality.
| [...] and this list includes several abjads as well.
Which ones? I've used the information in D&B to create this list, but
the information given there is very incomplete when it comes to types.
You still haven't answered the question, though. Do you consider all
these to be the same script? If so, can you explain why to a novice
like me who thinks that that's self-evidently wrong? Are runic and
armenian the same script? Are thaana and utopian?
If you think there's only one alphabet, do you think the other classes
also have just one member? If not, what's the difference?
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Also, you refer to your system. Where is that defined? Which classes
| does it consist of? Is "alphasyllabary" included, for example?
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| You claim you have access to WWS, and you don't know?
What's strange about that? WWS is written by you and Bright, who seem
to disagree on whether or not the terms "abugida" and "alphasyllabary"
should be used. How can I then know whether your system includes
alphasyllabary or whether WWS includes it as a compromise between you
and Bright? Given that the classes have almost entirely overlapping
membership it seems to me that any system that includes both is
inconsistent.