Re: Alphabets from Abugidas

Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
>
> > > Is that in addition to Lao?
> >
> > Non-gnomic comments are preferable.
> >
> > Are you proposing a historical link between Tamil and Lao?
>
> No historical link deeper than Pallava. It's just that Lao has also
> done away with implicit vowels, so the Lao script is now an
> alphabet. I wasn't sure what you meant by 'another region'.

Salomon identifies one other South Indian epigraphic script (from a
different branch than Tamil) that went alphabetic and died out. Maybe
the folks that tried it preferred the kind of orthography used for
Sanskrit either because it was numinous or because it really was better
for their purposes.

> Mind you, the only Pali sentences longer than a few words that I've
> seen in the Thai script were also written in an alphabetic sub-
> script - the anusvaras and implicit vowels are written out
> explicitly using normal consonants and vowels.

It's hard to find information on Pali ...
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...