Re: Lars Marius's "undecided" scripts (was: bidi scripts and langua

Peter T. Daniels scripsit:

> > Fraser script: this is not a script, but a Latin-script orthography for Lisu
>
> wrong

Well, then the term "Fraser script" is polysemous, unless you want to say
that the glyphs of the Latin capital letters have been recycled into a
novel script.

> > Old Persian Cuneiform: abugida, but has a few syllabograms and logograms
>
> not right

Can you please explain this? As far as I can make out, most letters have the
inherent vowel -a which can be overridden by an explicit vowel letter
following, but some letters have -i or -u in them instead (and cannot
be overridden?), and there are five logograms.

> > Pahawh Hmong: alphabet, but deeply bizarre
>
> wrong

Michael Everson already explained this.

> > Pollard script: alphabet, basically
>
> wrong

How is it to be classified, then? Vowels are written smaller than consonants,
and their relative position encodes tone.

> > Rongorongo: possible logosyllabary, undeciphered
>
> wrong, because undeciphered

How "wrong"? Can it be proved that it is not a logosyllabary? If not,
then that is surely a possibility, which is what I said.

--
Dream projects long deferred John Cowan <jcowan@...>
usually bite the wax tadpole. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
--James Lileks http://www.reutershealth.com