Re: Abugida*s*: exegesis of the differences

áÐ3áS•áS¤áˆ* áЫáЕá‰Ýብ (Dan iel Yacob) wrote:

>
> > > Since "femur" and "thigh-bone" are synonymous, and "syllabary" and
> > > "abugida" aren't, how can this be anything but arrant nonsense?
> > >
> > > Do at least try to pay attention.
> >
> > Now you're doing it too? The point at hand is whether people need to be
> > concerned with technical terminology.
>
> The point I was after was not terminology, a native user will refer to
> the script by the name of their language in most cases and of course
> will be unaware and uninterested in these finer points. What I think
> would be interesting to uncover is what model (abugida vs syllabary)
> best matches a persons unconcious understanding of their writing system.
> Which in turn I thought a series of carefully crafted questions might
> be able to determine.

Hopefully no psychologist would try to test whether their subjects
followed "Model A" or "Model B"; that would exclude the possibility of
discovering whether they actually followed "Model C"!

This seems to be a flaw in the vast majority of psycholinguistics --
they investigate whether they can confirm or disconfirm some particular
proposal of formal linguistics, rather than trying the much harder task
of discovering how brains actually process language.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...