* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Now we're getting somewhere. What is a segment?

* Peter Constable
|
| If you're familiar with the notion of a phoneme,

I'm not, unfortunately. (That's why I asked for good introductions to
phonetics.) They seem to be like letters, but subtly different. (The
description I looked at said they were different, but not how.)

| that is close to the notion of a segment. In phonology and
| phonetics, the simplifying assumption is made that the speech stream
| can be segmented into discrete units.

A linguistic dictionary told me[1] that segments are any kind of
speech fragment. Is that correct?

| Each of these would be atomic in the sense that is something that
| can be more or less independently articulated. There are also
| aspects of phonology that are "supra-segmental". These are
| characteristics of the speech stream that can span multiple
| segments: e.g. stress, tone, intonation.

So, if we return to Daniel's restated definition of featural scripts,
which was a script "in which graphic elements correlate with features
of pronunciation, i.e. notions smaller than the segment," this seems
to start to make some kind of sense.

Features of pronunciation are so small they can't be independently
articulated, and if the characters of a script have graphic elements
that correlate with such tiny features of pronunciation they are
featural. Right?

The question then becomes: what features of speech are so tiny you
can't articulate them on their own? Is it things such as that a sound
is labial, palatal, or velar? So if a script uses, say, a hook at the
top of a character to say that it represents a labial sound you have a
featural script?

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Mainly because the modifications used to indicate the vowels are not
| entirely systematic. There is a system, but it has deviations which
| must be learned. Thinking about it I guess I agree that despite them
| Ethiopic fits the class "abugida" better than it does "syllabary".

* Peter Constable
|
| As Peter D mentions, these classes don't have fixed boundaries, and
| the objects are not classified by a set of strictly required
| criteria. The classes have prototype definitions (see Lakoff's
| "Women, fire and dangerous things" for further discussion), and the
| best we can do is point to prototypical examples.

Now I am confused. If this is true, why are the definitions of these
classes given in WWS, and also in response to my questions, given in
terms of the properties of scripts, and not in terms of prototypes?

Peter Daniels has kept describing his typology as historically based,
but I've so far failed to understand what he means by that, given that
none of his definitions even refer to historical aspects of the scripts.
Also, his types have instances that are historically (or genetically)
distant, so what's historically based about his typology I just don't
know.

--Lars M.

[1] <URL: http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=573116&secid=.- >