Re: About "features"

Michael Everson wrote:

> > > 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.

Or, maybe, it's because I quoted the wrong sentence... :-) Sorry.

My comment about Gaelic orthography should have gone with this:

Michael Everson wrote in a previous post:

> 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.

What I meant with the Gaelic example was: many other scripts have dots,
accents, silent letters, vowel marks, or other "thingies" which are used in
a consistent way to indicate some phonetic difference.

The little "flags" which flutter on right side of some Fidel series could
well be detached and analyzed as diacritic vowel marks.

However, I agree that some other Fidel series show modifications which are
yes systematic, but which cannot be analyzed as "the addition of a mark":
one leg is crooked, one leg is longer, etc.

This parallels well with the non-detachable modifications in Tolkien's
Tengwar (longer stem, doubled arc, etc.).

This could be an understandable usage for the term "featural", but my
understanding is that this is not how the term is used by modern
grammatologists. Otherwise, how would it apply to Hangul?

> >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?

I'm afraid yes. :-) To me, this statement sounds like a generic definition
of "writing".

_ Marco