--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

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

1982?

No, I thought that I had seen the term around 1991 but I can't find
any citation. I remember discussing Indic scripts in '91 and
deciding not to write about them in my relatively short chapter.

I do remember that Olson said Indic scripts were descendant from the
Aramaic alphabet and were 'semi-syllabaries'. This indicated to me
a return to the syllabic mode in the east.

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

Thanks. I thought that word had a French origin. I thought that it
indicated a type of syllabary that followed the alphabet rather than
preceding it.

> There is no "logographic system" that doesn't include the syllabic
> element from the beginning.

I understand this but I have been using the term 'morphosyllabic'
myself for a long time for that kind of writing. Why obscure the
fact that Chinese is syllabic? Why pretend that Chinese syllables
are words? Has 'logo' totally lost the connotation of 'word' ?

I can't shake the sense that logographic is supposed to be different
from phonographic.

Suzanne McCarthy