suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Muke Tever" <muke@...> wrote:
> > Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...> wrote:
> I'm far from qualified to comment on its accuracy and
> > > quality.
> > >
> > > <http://www.answers.com/topic/canadian-aboriginal-syllabics>
> >
> > It's just a Wikipedia mirror. The original page is:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_Syllabics
>
> It pretty much reflects what I know. Quite detailed. Under 'current
> usgae' there is an description of what I am refering to.
>
> "In the past, government policy towards syllabics has varied from
> indifference to open hostility. Until quite recently, government
> policy in Canada openly undermined native languages and church
> organisations were often the only organised bodies using syllabics.
> Later, as governments became more accommodating of native languages
> and in some cases even encouraged their use, it was widely believed
> that moving to a Roman alphabet writing scheme was better both for
> linguistic reasons and to reduce the cost of supporting alternative
> writing schemes."
>
> There were 'linguistic reasons' for prefering an alphabet. An
> alphabet was thought to be more phonemic? After all there was lots
> of tech support for syllabics throughout its history.

"More phonemic" makes no sense. If every consonant phoneme had a row,
and every vowel phoneme had a column (or a column plus a diacritic),
there was no "additional" phonemicness to be had.

(If tone was to be notated, diacritics would need to be added whether
syllabics or alphabet.)

> Maybe it was because Bloomfield thought of writing as subordinate to
> or a reflection of speech, not an independent system of its won.

Then wouldn't this attitude lead a newly devised writing system to be as
faithful a representation of speech as possible, i.e. (for that era)
perfectly phonemic? That's certainly the goal of missionary linguists
devising what Smalley called "practical orthographies."

> For Bloomfield writing was 'merely a way of recording language by
> means of visible marks' . I am sure that in the first half of this
> century linguists believed that a phonemic orthography, and by that
> they usually meant alphabetic, was best.

Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
"non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...