suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> wrote:
>
> > I think it's good to know why people do things that seem, well,
> peculiar;
> > helps calm the waters.
>
> Another reason I wasn't snipping was technical. I wrote a post and
> then, fizz, the screen erased and I had to start again. I was often
> forgetting that I had to go back and snip all over again. It seems
> to work better if I go off-line to write.
>
> I should probably explain one of the many reason I looked up qalam.

It would have been a good idea to do so some time ago.

> I was reading the Unicode version 4 and it said something to this
> effect. Chinese characters are ideographic. And later Indic
> scripts are abugidas. I wasn't sure what to make of that. Maybe
> there is a glossary somewhere that I missed. I came into this group
> already feeling that there was a difficulty with the use of
> terminology.

Then you should be chastising Unicode, not the deviser of the
terminology, since the terminology seems to have been taken over without
understanding and inaccurately.

> There is also a sharp contrast between how Ethiopic and Indic
> scripts are coded. Ethiopic is coded as a syllabary much like Cree
> with the first column of characters representing CV syllables. The
> first column appears to me to be unmodified characters but still
> very definitely a set CV syllables.

In Ethiopic, the first column _is_ unmodified characters and _is_ very
definitely a set of Ca (not random or arbitrary CV) syllables.

> Tamil, on the other hand appears as a list of consonants and
> vowels. The consonants have the inherent vowel 'a'. The user has to
> construct all the other syllables. Logically I would expect to see
> CV syllables rather than consonants with inherent vowels.

How is this different from Ethiopic (except in how Unicode foolishly
chose to present their chart)?

> There are, of course, many technical and pragmatic explanations for
> the coding which I have no reason to question, now that Uniscribe is
> working and the consonants and vowels aren't strewing themselves
> across the screen in a disconnected fashion.

Which is hardly the problem of either me _or_ Unicode.

> Since I was previously very familiar with Cree, coded as syllabary,
> and somewhat familiar with Ethiopic, coded as a syllabary, I was
> having trouble figuring out why Tamil, listed as an abugida, had
> only consonants and vowels that could not be connected. The main

"Could not be"? Then how would it be possible to type in Tamil? And
would not the appropriate comparison be Malayalam/Grantha/Telugu/Kannada
and then Sinhala/Oriya/Bengali/Gujarati/Devanagari (and not so much
Gujarati, since that was a deliberate invention using the Devanagari
model)? (Yeah, that's where the "9" comes from -- India doesn't care
about Sinhala!)

> point is that the terminology leads to misunderstandings, of which I
> have had many.

Now we see that it is not at all the terminology that led to your many
misunderstandings, but the presentation in a Unicode book.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...