Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > I can live being told that this is not the best way to
> define "featural",
> > but I will continue to think we're failing intellectually
> if we can't say
> > explicitly what the definition of "featural" should be.
>
> Maybe you can "classify" writing systems without using the category.
> Fine! But if your "classification" doesn't note that Korean is
> qualitatively different from all the others, then it's missing
> something.

Any term is arbitrary and conventional, of course. Nevertheless, standing
the linguistic meaning of the English term "feature", seems to me that
"featural" may suggests "something connected with (phonetic) features".

But Hangul is not more "connected with phonetic features" than many other
writings systems. What is unique in Hangul (compared to purely alphabetic
writing) is that each syllable is graphically organized in a square cluster,
which must necessarily include an initial consonant sign, a vowel sign, and
an optional final consonant sign.

So, one could argue that the term "featural" fails to explain *what* is
unique in Hangul. And we could also argue that it has the same kind of
problems that you noted in the term "ideographic": the thing it
conventionally refers to has nothing to do with the literal meaning of the
term.

However, while "ideographic" is a venerable term, very difficult to
eradicate, "featural" is much younger, and perhaps it is still possible to
come up with a more descriptive alternative: "clustered"? "structured"?
"syllabic"? etc.

_ Marco