suzmccarth wrote:

> > So you want to go back to the middle of the 19th century, before even E.
> > B. Tylor! (As far as I can tell, the earliest appearance of the
> > tripartite typology, word sign - syllable sign - sound sign, is Isaac
> > Taylor in 1883, but he doesn't present it as his own idea, nor does he
> > credit anyone else.)
>
> "G.Vico (1668 -1744) examined the different languages known during
> his time (Greek, Egyptian , Turkish, German, Hungarian ... ) and
> their writing systems in order ot divide them into the three
> categories just mentionned." Kristeva. 1989. (divine, poetic and
> epistolatory) I am not sure about how this lines up exactly but it
> is tripartite. I imagine that the evolutionary model, the ladder
> idea, became popular again in the 1880's since this was the reigning
> metaphor of that age. I don't see any reason not to go back to
> another time.

So -- if anyone suggests describing anything in threes, it's the same as
any other division into three? How Dumézilian. How Christian.

> How about the essential unity of all writing?

What "essential unity"?

> BTW thanks for the definition of abugida. More or less what I
> thought but Tamil and Ethiopic aren't similar in Unicode. Maybe
> Unicode ought not to use the term.

I really don't give a good g*d damn what Unicode does.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...