Re: Typology and classification Re: everything else

Peter_Constable@... wrote:

>
> On 11/09/2001 10:51:13 PM "Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
>
> >> And I'd suggest that my observations about typology and Hangul made me
> >> recognise that a seemingly unrelated phonomenon could be newly
> accounted
> >> for in a unified way.
> >
> >Namely ... ?
>
> (I have to go over it again?)
>
> Namely this: in discussions on typology of writing systems that I have
> heretofor read, there was one basis for forming defining criteria that
> covered all scripts except Hangul; for Hangul, a type was defined on a
> rather different basis. I have suggested that a typology is possible that
> defines a set of types that cover *all* scripts on a single basis: what
> kind of relationships exist between linguistic objects and structural
> elements in the writing system that are used to represent them. Structural
> elements in (e.g.) Latin or Arabic typically represent phones/phonemes;
> structural elements in (e.g.) Cree or Katakana typically represent
> syllables; Hangul has structural elements that represent phones/phonemes
> but also has structural elements that represent syllables.

And that's no different from, and no more revealing than, the typology
that was in place from Taylor to Gelb and all those who have since
followed Gelb. Sampson, expanding that system, noted that Hangul has
structural elements that represent features, viz. the iconicity of the
basic shapes and the successive addition of marks in a systematic way
(from the point of view of 15th-century Korean phonological theory) to
arrive at the other letters. (The vowels, of course, were a lot more
regular before 550 years of sound change.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...