--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Young-Key Kim-Renaud <kimrenau@...>
wrote:

The letters are not put into syllable blocks randomly as

> > > a bundle! That is why han'gul is neither a syllabary nor an
> > > alphasyllabary, but simply an alphabet.

Korean seems to me also to fit best with alphabets as it is a script
that segments and sequences phonemes. The reason for hesitating
when the word linear comes up is that Korean does not fit phonemes
in a 'line' on the computer so it originally got a different
treatment than alphabets. But otherwise I think it fits well into
the alphabet class.

Tamil fits well in a line on the computer but is not sequenced. I
believe that this does disqualify it from being an alphabet because
there is no constant visual mapping below syllable level. It is just
not that children learn Tamil as a syllabary but that they do *not*
learn it as an alphabet.

So for me Korean fits as an alphabet and Tamil and Cree as syllabic
acripts. (Rethinking this I would have to say that linearity is not
the best way to describe this quality of the alphabet but there
should be some other word that alludes to the ability to segment and
sequence phonemes.)

Suzanne McCarthy