John Cowan wrote:

>
> Lars Marius Garshol scripsit:
>
> > What do you mean by this? That if we ignore how tones are written the
> > script is an alphabet, but if we do consider the tones it has to be
> > considered to belong to some other type? Or something else entirely?
>
> The key point here is that the relative positions of certain letters
> encodes something, which is certainly not typical of an alphabet.

Kinda like Ethiopic, Pollard and Fraser fall out of my head moments
after every time I have to use them, but I was amused when typing up the
table (or maybe when compiling the font in the first place) to discover
that the orientations of the letters in whichever one it is are
featural. (Just a little extra bonus. Like when the shorthand teacher at
the secretarial school in Chicago I phoned told me that no, they don't
teach any phonetics to the students, and no one has ever looked into
whether Gregg shorthand is in some way better for being featural than if
the shapes were arbitrary.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...