At 16:19 +0100 2001-11-13, Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>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.

But the regular shortening of legs and so on can't. So, as you also
noticed, I don't think it's right to consider the others as
diacritics.

>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.).

Yes.

>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?

Featurality in Hangul has to do with e.g. the K/G series, where the
voicing is indicated by duplication of the horizontal.

> > 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".

A set of glyphs whose shapes represent a set of phonetic entities and
whose shapes show a systematic correlation to the different classes
of phonetic entities is a featural set of glyphs.
--
Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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