suzmccarth wrote:

>
> Peter, I have to admit that I am not sure what the
> term 'alphasyllabary' originally meant beyond the fact that it
> referred to Tamil. I gave up on writing system theory as it was in
> 1982 since it seemed relatively irrelevant to my purposes. From
> then on I have had only idiosyncratic definitions, as you have
> rightly observed.

Do you have a citation of "alphasyllabary" from as long ago as 1982?

> However, I had been thinking that 'alphasyllabary'
> and 'neosyllabariy' meant syllabaries that developed from alphabets
> or developed after the alphabet; just as logosyllabary was a
> syllabary that developed from a logographic system.
>
> Maybe you would tell me how this term has most commonly been
> defined. Thank you.

Only Bill Bright can tell you that, since he invented the word and
imposed it on articles he edited.

"Néo-syllabaire" appears in Février; he used the term because he
recognized they aren't syllabaries.

There is no "logographic system" that doesn't include the syllabic
element from the beginning. Without that you have only "ideography,"
which isn't writing.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...