Michael Everson wrote:

>
> 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.

And the corpus is so small that we don't know how a few CVs would have
been written if they had occurred.

> > > > 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.

Only if Modern Aramaic (Nestorian) is called an alphabet pure and
simple; the tone thing might cast it into another type entirely (no, we
are NOT going to have the fight about minutely carving up the universe
so everything fits into exactly one pigeonhole again)

> > > > 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?

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...