Re: The definitions face to face at last

Marco Cimarosti wrote:

Thank you, Marco.

> John Cowan wrote:
> > [...]
>
> For Unicode, you gave "abjad" twice and no "abugida". Here is the corrected
> synopsis:

Rearranging so they are comparable -- WWS, then Unicode:

> abjad a type of writing system that denotes only consonants

> Abjad. A consonant writing system. The main letters are all consonants
> (or long vowels) with other vowels either left out entirely or indicated
> with secondary marking of the consonants. The best-known example is the
> Arabic writing system, and the term "abjad" is derived from the first
> four letters of the traditional order of the Arabic script.

The differences, for the one among you who cannot see them: absense of
"only"; presence of "(or long vowels)"; mention of secondary markings;
bad example. The only pure example is Phoenician.

> abugida a type of writing system whose basic characters denote consonants
> followed by a particular vowel, and in which diacritics denote the
> other vowels

> Abugida. A special type of writing system encompassing the many scripts of
> South and
> Southeast Asia that are historically derived from the ancient Brahmi script.
> The term
> abugida is derived from the North Semitic alphabetic order: alef, bet,
> gimel, dalet.

The differences: No definition whatsoever; omission of Ethiopic; wrong
statement of etymology (maybe John was subconsciously ashamed of the
poorness of the passage, and omitted it Freudianly!)

> alphabet a type of writing system that denotes consonants and vowels

> Alphabet. A writing system that consists of letters for the writing of
> both consonants and vowels. Consonants and vowels have equal status as
> letters in an alphabet. The Latin alphabet is the most widespread and
> well-known example of an alphabet. The correspondence between letters
> and sounds may be either more or less exact; most alphabets do not
> exhibit a one-to-one correspondence between distinct sounds (phonemes)
> and distinct letters (graphemes).

(I didn't complain about this one, of course, though the first sentence
is otiose and the last sentence applies to any writing system at all,
and of course "grapheme" is here, as so often, used pretheoretically and
serves no purpose.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...