Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

>
> * Peter T. Daniels
> |
> | A symbol represents a specific vowel plus a neutral consonant -- and
> | the consonant is modified by prefixing a symbol for a different
> | consonant.
>
> I was wondering whether that might be your rationale.
>
> | That's totally parallel to the standard abugida, where a symbol
> | represents a specific consonant plus a neutral vowel -- and the
> | vowel is modified by adjoining a symbol for a different vowel.
>
> I agree that it is *parallel* to an abugida, but it doesn't fit the
> definition given in WWS, since that explicitly describes consonants as
> the base character.

I totally refuse to participate in the renewal of this fight about
exhaustively dividing the universe into mutually exclusive labeled
pigeonholes. They are useful for engineers, not for linguists.

> To me it seems that it may be useful to modify the typology by
> splitting the abugidas into two groups, based on the type of the base
> symbol.
>
> Script
> |
> +-- Abjad
> +-- Alphabet
> +-- Featural script
> +-- Abugida
> | |
> | +-- Vowel abugida
> | +-- Consonant abugida
> +-- Syllabary
>
> The "vowel" abugida seems to me to work in a quite different way from
> the "consonant" abugida. The first thing you see when you look at a
> word in Pahawh Hmong is the central vowel of the syllable, followed by
> the initial consonant. Or don't you consider that a significant
> difference?
>
> Another question is: are there any other known examples of "vowel"
> abugidas?
>
> | Same idea, but clearly not based on the closest available models,
> | Lao and Thai!
>
> True. I liked Ratliff's comment that Shong Lue Yang seems to have
> perceived vowels as primary. The script does look as if he did, and as
> far as I can tell it is the only one that does.

And thus it's not a "type." It's unique.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...