* Peter T. Daniels
|
| 30 (Orkhon) is partly syllabic
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| I've missed something, then. The table on page 537 of WWS, and the
| sample on 538 both seem entirely alphabetic to me. What are the
| syllabic elements in it?
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| I was remembering the superscripts in the table. They indicate that some
| vowel information is in the consonant letters.
You are right. There is some kind of syllabic structure to it.
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| I don't need to "classify" them, since how they work is clear:
| clearly they're different from alphabets -- they're compulsorily
| vocalized abjads!
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| From the definition on p 4 of WWS I concluded that a compulsorily
| vocalized abjad is an alphabet. There are also statements to that
| effect in WWS (in the article on Syriac). If the rules given in WWS
| are incomplete I've just learned something new.
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| They're not "rules."
That's entirely beside the point, which was that you've extended the
definition of alphabet in your postings to qalam compared to that
given in WWS. (There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, but
it did make distinguishing between abjads and alphabet rather
difficult for me.)
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| What's the point of separating alphabets from abjads with vowels,
| though? Aren't they in effect pretty much the same? Does it make much
| difference for the relation between language and writing whether the
| vowel characters have secondary status?
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| I don't think the psycholinguists have looked much into the matter ...
In that case I think I'll stick to the definition given in WWS and let
alphabet mean any script that writes vowels and consonants with
separate symbols.
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| There are many interpretations of this question, but I'll try my best.
|
| It's useful because then I can write "the Phoenician script is an
| abjad", or "'Phags pa is an abugida", and people who know nothing else
| about the scripts suddenly have at least some idea of how they work.
|
| It's also useful because I can present the different classes of
| writing systems and having read that presentation the reader will have
| gained a real understanding of the different kinds of scripts used
| around the world.
|
| Were these answers to the question you meant to ask?
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| Then the typology as-is serves its purpose, and you don't need
| something mathematically precise and exhaustive.
I think we're dealing with a false disagreement here. I'm not sure
that the existing typology won't serve my purposes, and I can't be
until I understand it. I am beginning to understand it better, and as
I do it seems to work pretty well.
If I've now understood what a featural script is, I should be in
pretty good position to judge, but that will take a little longer. It
seems to me that I'll have to go back to my previous classifications
and verify that they are correct. Once I've done that I'll be able to
tell what I think I should do.
As it is I think I see only one necessary adjustment: to lift the
restriction that alphabets must have characters of equal stature to
represent consonants and vowels. With this requirement Thaana and
Modern syriac become unhappy typeless orphans, while without it they
are alphabets. This requirement also seems to me to serve no useful
purpose.
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| But there's exactly one example of each, and the transition is
| perfectly clear:
|
| Phoenician >>> Greek.
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Perhaps.
|
| This the transitions my topic map tells me exists:
|
| Classical syriac >>> Modern syriac
| Arabic script >>> Thaana
| Phoenician script >>> Greek
| Pahlavi >>> Avestan
| Mongolian clear script >>> Buryat
* Peter T. Daniels
|
| [...]
| Avestan and Buryat, of course, are made with full knowledge of the Greek
| and Cyrillic alphabets respectively, so they're not "unsophisticated
| grammatogeny," so not interesting.
I think it's time to go back to what I originally wrote: "It seems
that the line between alphabet and abjad, for example, is fairly
subtle, and since nobody, to my knowledge, has made an authoritative
list of the classifications of various scripts, I am reduced to
finding the correct answers by asking people who know."
To which you responded that there was one such transition. That's
entirely beside the point, because there is more than one case of
abjads turning into alphabets, and so the fact that the alphabet was
only invented once does not make it any easier for me to figure out
what writing systems are abjads and which are alphabets.