suzmccarth wrote:

>
> Instead of the evolutionary model of logographies, syllabaries, and
> alphabets, etc. I suggest that there are only two basic types of
> systems.

The above is not "evolutionary."

> These are alphabets or analytic systems, and syllabaries or
> wholistic systems. Each of these may encode to a lesser or greater
> degree the morphology of the language. Syllabaries may be non-
> analytic like Japanese and Cherokee, or have an analytic composition
> like Cree, Korean and Tamil.

You have just taken a giant step backward. It was the recognition of the
distinction between syllabaries (Japanese and Cherokee) and abugidas
(Ethiopic and Indic; not Cree or Korean) that made possible my insights
into the origins of writing and what I have just now begun calling the
functional (formerly internal) history of writing (as opposed to the
formal/descriptive/external history found in Diringer, Jensen, etc.).

> While the analytic nature of the syllabaries may be useful for
> technical encoding, these systems are still learned by some native
> speakers as syllabaries. Some members of these language communities
> will have reduced access to digital literacy if the syllabic nature
> of their system is not reflected at some level in the input method.

Linguistics does not proceed according to what people believe about
their languages, but according to what is observed about languages.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...