At 18:30 -0400 2002-07-14, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>Michael Everson wrote:
>>
>> At 18:01 -0400 2002-07-13, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>>
>> >It certainly is an abugida, but of a unique type -- the only model I can
>> >find to account for it is Burmese, and Smalley doesn't explicitly say
>> >that he wasn't exposed to Burmese writing, only Lao, Thai, or
>> >Vietnamese!
>>
>> Burmese behaves pretty unremarkably, Peter. What do you mean by this?
>
>The "wretched excess" of Indic consonants (compared to the small number
>of Burmese ones) allows their letters to be used for differentiating
>Burmese's wretched excess of vowels.

Ah, I see what you are getting at. Hm. A number of scripts in the
region divide up the excess consonants to indicate classes of vowels,
such as Khmer KA, KHA vs. KO, KHO (where Brahmic gives KA KHA GA
GHA). New Tai Lue regularized the system rather neatly. What Shong
Yue Yang did could have been influenced by that kind of thing. The
Lao repertoire is so reduced that I don't think it would have been
much help to him.

The way the system works, though, makes me tend to think that he
worked out the analysis himself and reinvented the abugida on his own
or had a very rudimentary understanding of how the other writing
systems worked. That, or he deliberately made the system a
mirror-image of the Brahmic abugidas. Compare Varang Kshiti, for
instance.
--
Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com