Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > How about "symbols for most vowels are optional, or may not
> > be present
> > > at all"? As opposed to an alphabet, where they must be present.
> >
> > No. Symbols for vowels are not present at all. Period.
>
> So Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac are not abjads?

Unvocalized, they are. Add the points, and they're alphabets.

> > > >> * An abugida has the concept of an inherent vowel, which must be
> > > >> explicitly overridden if not present.
> > > >
> > > > An abugida has the inherent unmarked vowel; overriding is
> > irrelevant
> > >
> > > How does one indicate vowels other than A, or consonant
> > clusters, in an
> > > abugida without overriding them? If they go totally
> > unmarked, aren't we
> > > really using an abjad?
> >
> > No, we're providing minimal definitions. The use of vowel marks is
> > implicit in the definition.
>
> How so?
>
> If you just say "An abugida has an inherent unmarked vowel", full stop, what
> the audience gathers is that *only* that vowel can be expressed in writing.

Look at the first pages of your Euclid for minimal-type definitions
(axioms and postulates).

> > > OK, I freely admit my error wrt Ethiopic. I'm neither the
> > > first nor the
> > > last to be misled (*) by the fact that it's encoded that way.
> > > (* semi-gratuitous use of the word)
> >
> > That what's encoded what way?
>
> He said he was misled by the way *Unicode* encodes Ethiopic: one code per
> sillable, as it does with genuine syllabaries such as katakana or Cherokee.

Well, Unicode has nothing to do with script typology! It just does
things as they're convenient. Doesn't it have to handle syllabically the
Indic scripts that have idiosyncratic treatments of -u, for instance (I
think Malayalam is one of them)?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...