suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- 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.

Bill doesn't remember inventing the term. I think it's in one of the
articles in the slim volume of his collected Dravidian papers from
Oxford. (I've never found a copy of the Anwar Dil vol. from Stanford in
that series of volumes of collected papers.)

> 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.

Where did he get that word, and how did he intend it, and they can't
have "returned" to anyplace they'd never been!

> > "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.

No connection between those scripts and the alphabetic one.

> > 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.

Then study your DeFrancis! (He gets some of the details about Sumerian
wrong, but the principle remains sound.) (as it were.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...