--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> Obviously, the paradigm example of an abugida is Brahmi, the
> "perfection" of Kharoshthi. Its descendants, most familiarly

Devanagari

> but also all the Indic scripts, retain the abugida principle;

Tamil has

> departed farthest from Brahmi of all, in abandoning the conjunct

system,

> using dots to mark the boundaries instead.

The Tamil section, Section 9.6, of the Unicode 4.0.0 Standard has
got it wrong then. It claims that all clusters work as conjuncts,
with a phonetically following preposed vowel (/e/ etc.) preceding
the cluster. However, it seems that only the 'k.s' cluster, which
has no visible virama, works that way. I have seen this ligature
treated as a letter.

>(Even the Southeast Asian
> scripts, whose phonetics are very different from Indian phonetics,

still

> variously make use of the abugidic resources to indicate vowel

quality,

> consonant quality, or tone.)

The only abugidic feature of the Lao script (at least as used for
Lao) is an inherent tone (dependent on the class of the consonant),
which may be changed by the addition of a tone mark. Is this
an 'abugidic resource'? Apart from the fact that most Southeast
Asian scripts are still abugidic in that they have inherent vowels,
I don't see what _abugidic_ resources they use. Surely _you_ aren't
referring to the positioning of the vowel marks. As ancient voicing
contrasts are often represented by other contrasts instead, the
choice of consonant may indicate vowel quality or tone, but surely
that would have happened had the Brahmi script been a true alphabet.

Richard.