At 11:21 AM 8/6/2004, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> >Under which definition would a /consonant/vowel/consonant writing system
> fall, if a final consonant was a diacritic mark?

>I get the impression that the old Lanna script did something like
>that. That's based on Unicode proposal N013 - see
><http://www.evertype.com/standards/tai/n1013-lanna.pdf>http://www.evertype.com/standards/tai/n1013-lanna.pdf
>and
><http://www.evertype.com/standards/tai/lanna-analysis.pdf>http://www.evertype.com/standards/tai/lanna-analysis.pdf
>.

Lanna and old Lue (and old Lao) have a set of coda "diacritics"
that allow for CVC chucnks, BUT, sometimes the "diacritics" are part of the
following syllable as well (and not in the sense of the geminate values as
found in Std Thai Pali-Sanskrit renditions)...

>Having just taken a look at Tai Le, for which I'm not sure whether the
>inherent vowel is what's recorded as /a:/ or what's recorded as /a/, I
>have to say that is an example of it not being a very useful
>distinction. Tai Le is, sensibly in my opinion, 'encoded as an alphabet',
>and as the vowels always follow the consonants, I think that it is very
>sensible to regard it as a proper alphabet,
>even though it satisfies the requirements of an abugida.

Tai Le "inherent" vowel is /a/, not /a:/...

Given the way that modern Tai Neua/Le/Na has developed, it's just
as well to consider it an alphabet as opposed to any of the previous stages
of its development.

cheers,
-Patrick