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

At 16:27 -0400 2003-07-30, John Cowan wrote:

> > > 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.

Daniels is right. It's a syllabary with some alphabetic elements, not
an abugida per se.

> > > Pollard script: alphabet, basically
>>
>> wrong
>
>How is it to be classified, then? Vowels are written smaller than consonants,
>and their relative position encodes tone.

Pollard seems alphabetic to me.

> > > Rongorongo: possible logosyllabary, undeciphered
> >
> > wrong, because undeciphered
>
>How "wrong"? Can it be proved that it is not a logosyllabary?

It can't be *proved* that it's writing. Why logosyllabary? Why not syllabary?
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com