From: Peter T. Daniels
Message: 2831
Date: 2004-07-09
>It certainly does not. Why would the points have been invented, yet kept
> John Cowan wrote:
>
> >Peter T. Daniels scripsit:
> >
> >
> >
> >>>So Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac are not abjads?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>Unvocalized, they are. Add the points, and they're alphabets.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Most modern Arabic and Hebrew texts, however, are neither fully pointed
> >nor fully unpointed: rather, they are strategically pointed with matres
> >lectionis.
> >
> >
> Even worse, they are strategically pointed with occasional actual
> vowel-points and not matres. That is, you'll often see a word with a
> single letter vowel-pointed, for the simple reason that it could be
> misunderstood, even with all the possible matres in place.
>
> It's a little strange to me that one would classify writing systems such
> that the basic category of a system changes like this, adding optional
> diacritics. I mean, yes, you can define anything you like, but such an
> unstable system starts to lose its usefulness. Whatever Hebrew is, it
> makes more sense to classify it the same whether or not it's pointed.
> Is the inherent vowel so crucial and novel a feature that it's worth--
> inventing an entire category for it? Apart from that, there isn't much
> difference between a devanagari-style alphabet and a Hebrew-style one
> (well, the fact that devanagari vowels also have full-letter forms, I
> guess is the main one). And even in devanagari, lack of vowel or
> consonant cluster isn't always indicated by virama or ligaturing, in
> Hindi, anyway. (Since I only learned Sanskrit, where the inherent "a"
> vowel is strictly observed, that always throws me when trying to sound
> out Hindi, in which the inherent "a" is often--but not always--dropped,
> from what I've heard).