Andrew Dunbar wrote:

>
> --- "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote: > Peter Constable wrote:
> > >
> > > > From: Mark E. Shoulson [mailto:mark@...]
> > >
> > > > 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.
> > >
> > > I agree; otherwise, we can't classify scripts; we
> > > can only classify runs of text.
> >
> > Or, maybe, Hebrew writing was transformed by the
> > Masoretes, so now there are in fact two ways of
> > writing Hebrew, the old-fashioned way, which
> > retains most of its abjadity, and the new-fangled
> > way, which never really did catch on, which pretty
> > much achieves alphabeticity?
>
> But it did catch on in 2 ways:
> 1) As a writing system, Hebrew script was adapted to
> Yiddish which always uses vowels, in which case it
> is being used as an alphabet. (Not that Yiddish is
> so common nowadays).
>
> Yiddish is written in the Hebrew script but the
> Yiddish alphabet.
>
> 2) In the Hebrew novels I have, there is usually at
> least one pointed word per page or so. The first one
> I remember spotting was the word "geisha" in the
> translation of "Memoir of a Geisha".
>
> Is Memoir of a Geisha written in an abjad or an
> alphabet? Or is it written in two different types
> of scripts?

Hmm, you weren't around the last time this came up -- when the computer
engineers insisted that a typology has to be an exhaustive and unique
classification with every entity fitting into exactly one pigeonhole
with no overlap and no empty spaces.

Hebrew has moved a bit away from the prototypical abjad, first by
adopting matres from Aramaic, and later by occasionally using a vowel
point from the sacred script used only for Tanakh. That doesn't suddenly
make it stop being an abjad; it makes it a less prototypical abjad.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...