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

> Richard Wordingham wrote:

> > 2. One development process is abjad > abugida > neosyllabary (though
> > he may not accept that the last stage has actually happened).

> What do _you_ mean by "neosyllabary"?

I'm not convinced that there is actually any such beast. It's a
syllabary (in so much as a non-kana like Cree is a syllabary) in which
the abugida / pointed abjad / alphabetic features are so obscured that
it is sensibly treated as a kana. It may be that the difference
between, say, an abugida and a neosyllabary depends on the user's
background - a Tamil child might only see a neosyllabary, whereas a
graduate may see an abugida with some unpredictable ligatures and even
some that are opaque. To me, the latter isn't very different from what
happens in combining consonants to form an akshara - or for that
matter, the forms of some subscript consonants in SE Asian scripts.

> > It makes a nonsense of PTD's scheme to call an abugida or Korean a
> > syllabary; I believe that is why he regards it as 'necessary' to
> > restrict the meaning of the term. (An alternative would be to find a
> > more precise name for what he regards as a syllabary.)
>
> You wanna call it a kana? Fine. Then Cherokee has a kana and Cree
> doesn't.

I have some qualms about using the word 'kana' (katakana and hiragana
do have some common features that other syllabaries do not), but apart
from that, fine. And you are right about Cherokee and Cree.

Richard.