suzmccarth wrote:

>
> Peter,
> I like your rigourous approach to defining writing systems but I
> wonder if it wouldn't add clarity to use morphosyllabic instead of
> logosyllabary. It stresses the representation of both meaning
> and sound rather than focusing on what may or may not be a
> word.
> Morphosyllabic as a term is also a nice parallel to
> morphophonemic, the representation of meaning and sound by
> analytic systems or alphabets.

I argue _against_ rigor ;-) on the grounds that scripts are human
creations and there's no reason to expect them to fit into the computer
jocks' exhaustive categories, and usually I say "logosyllabic (or, more
exactly, morphosyllabic)," but then you have to try to explain to the
audience what a morpheme is.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...