suzmccarth wrote:

> 1. Some scripts have linear, sequenced blocks of letters and some
> have syllable blocks. (This way I do not have to use terms like
> syllabaries, alphabets and abugidas.) Normally the systems with
> linear blocks are in the first section of languages in language
> support and work like a western alphabet.
>
> 2. There are systems with syllable blocks and they are on the
> computer Asian languages, specifically CKJ.
>
> 3. Then I have to explain what "complex" means. I must make this
> meaningful...

This is easy... In one word: it means NOTHING!

As someone already explained, the term "complex" in defining Indian and
other scripts is an ENGINEERING concept bound to Unicode and digital fonts
that, IMHO, should have NO place in a didactic description of the script.

The fact that in Tamil and other Indic scripts vowel satellites can be on
any of the four sides of a consonant letter makes things more "complex" for
programmers who have to write a display function, because they will have to
swap the sequence of some character codes before starting looking up glyphs
in the font.

But this "complexity" does not apply to you, unless you are teaching
programming for internationalization in a computer science faculty...

For someone who is learning to read and write Tamil (using a pencil or a
keyboard) or learning Tamil as a foreign language, this is a non issue: just
like the accent in the Spanish letter "Á" is ABOVE the letter, the cedilla
in the French letter "Ç" is BELOW the letter, the apostrophe in the Czech
letter "T'" is on the RIGHT side of the letter... and the vowel sign in the
Tamil syllabic cluster "kai" ("சை") is on the LEFT side of the letter.

> so I could say that (besides the bidi scripts, we
> understand those) there are writing systems that are linear but not
> sequenced by sound production.

IMHO, you are stressing too much the matter of linearity.

Most scripts, including our own Latin alphabet, are "non linear" at the same
degree than Tamil, or even more: Tamil has 11 vowel signs; Latin has dozens
diacritic signs, which are found in languages as familiar as Spanish or
French.

> These systems are normally arranged
> into syllable blocks when they are taught to children on paper but on
> the computer they are not composed in syllable blocks.

I'll reveal you one thing: when I attended the elementary school (in Italy,
not in Tamil Nadu), I have been taught to write in exactly the same way.

My father must still have somewhere my 1st grade notebook, which is full of
drills like these:

ba be bi bo bu
ca che chi co cu
cia ce ci cio cio
....
gna gne gni gno gnu
...
qua que qui quo cu
...
scia sce sci scio sciu
...
va ve vi vo vu
za ze zi zo zu

We had about 100 flashcards with all the C+V combinations. After
familiarizing with separate syllables, we started to compose words such as
"CANE" ('dog') selecting the two cards "CA" and "NE", or "GNOMO" ('dwarf')
selecting "GNO" and "MO". Then, we copied out the word on our notebook and
added a drawing of a dog or a dwarf.

Only towards the end of 1st grade syllabic flashcards were abandoned as we
started introducing consonant clusters such as NT in "CANTO" ('song').

This method (which has now been abandoned, as far as I know) tried to
exploit the fact that Italian has so many CV syllables, and that children in
pre-writing age show a natural ability to correctly segment words into
syllables and a tendency to write one letter per syllable (my 5 year-old
son, "Martino", still signs his drawing with "MOT": one letter per syllable,
chosen between the letter that he sees in his name in "adults' writing").

_ Marco