Re: About "features"

At 11:43 +0100 2001-11-13, Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>Michael Everson wrote:
> >>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. [...]
>
>But, then, one could conclude that almost every script is "featural"...

I don't see that this follows at all. The nature of the
correspondences could be anything depending on how the language was
analyzed. Maybe I didn't say this very well.

>Even Gaelic consistently uses an "h" on the right of consonants (or a dot on
>top of them) to show aspiration, and an acute accent to show vowel length.
>So if you consider "á", "bh", "ch", "dh", "é", etc. as single "letters", you
>could say that the Gaelic script is featural. And English uses the same "h"
>to show palatalization in "ch" and "sh", and so on...

No, you're talking about the use of diacritical marks and digraphs in
orthography.

>My understanding was that the term "featural" applies to a writing in which
>the main graphic units denote "features" (or "traits" or "phonetic
>properties").

Yes. All I was saying is that the set of phonetic entities chosen to
be represented by a corresponding set of glyphs in a systematic way
needn't be a full phonetic repertoire as we linguists think of it. Is
that too abstract?

This is the notion Tolkien had with the Tengwar, methinks.
--
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