John Cowan wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels scripsit:
>
> > > Personally, I think you should know. If someone tells me that Tamil
> > > is coded as *an* abugida, then you need to know that he does not
> > > mean that Tamil is encoded like *the* abugida. About lack of
> >
> > And now I'm supposed to know what you mean by "*an*" vs. "*the*"?
>
> It seems pretty straightforward to me. Since the term "abugida" is derived
> from Ethiopic tradition, it is fair enough to call Ethiopic *the* abugida;
> however, Unicode encodes it as a syllabary, while encoding the Indic
> scripts in abugida fashion. This is a bit paradoxical if you care about the
> historical derivation of "abugida". If you don't, it's perfectly reasonable.

As I have repeatedly said, I would much rather have had a
Sanskrit-derived name for the type than a Ge`ez one, but no such term
appears to exist.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...