suzmccarth wrote:
>
> I have just been reading an article by Bright
>
> http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc17/ka/paper.doc
>
> where he mentions that you pointed out the monosyllabic morpheme in
> Chinese, Mayan and Sumerian. I did not know before today that this
> was one of your discoveries. A few years ago (3 or 4) I decided that
> there must be monosyllabic morphemes in classical Mayan, as well as
> Smerian and Chinese. I had no idea if this was true nor had I ever
> read about it, but felt it must be so from the way I had organized
> writing systems. When I went to the library to check I found that
> it was in fact true. I have in every way tried to test my system
> and find out if it predicted certain patterns. So far it has. As
> has yours also. My work has been for the most part private and
> unpublished as I do not work in an academic context.
>
> On the point of Indic scripts, I have been so far been content to
> think of Tamil as a syllabic script which developed from a
> consonantary alphabet. I am not sure how the actual term abugida
> lead you to a new discovery. What was this exactly?

I really can't lay it all out in e-mails. You'll need to find *The
Linguistics of Literacy* ed. Downing, Lima, and Noonan (Sue Lima did
most of the work) (Benjamins, 1992; pbk. reprint later), or persuade a
publisher that there _is_ a market for a book by me.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...