At 21:42 -0600 2001-11-12, Peter_Constable@... wrote:

>On 11/12/2001 07:56:41 PM Michael Everson wrote:
>
>>At 00:25 +0100 2001-11-13, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
>>
>>>Right. So being a phonetic alphabet is not enough to make a system
>>>featural? There has to be correspondences between graphical shapes and
>>>general aspects of the sounds referred to?
>>
>>I should think so.
>
>But what is the nature of the correspondences? That is the aspect of
>"featural" that I have not seen clearly explained, and I would really like
>to know what people are meaning when they say that.

It could be anything. It depends on the script. Look at appendix E of
the Lord of the Rings where it describes the Tengwar. There isn't
even a permanent meaning attached to any of the letters. The point is
that they are supposed to be adapted, systematically, to the
phonetics of whatever language they are being used to write.

Ethiopic would be featural because the little flag thingies tend
(tend, mind) to be used in the same way in the different series to
indicate the same vowel. Of course there are exceptions due to ductus
and all.

One could consider the Latin letters P B F to be considered featural,
if you take P to be basic, consider B to be double-bowed to add voice
and F to have a broken bow to show affrication. That's pushing it but
it could be the basis for inventing a script, which would probably
look like Tengwar....

The West African syllabaries, some of them, do things like add dots
in the centre to indicate some vowels. Whatever the system is, it's
the systematic relation of glyphs to sounds that makes it featural.
--
Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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