--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:

>
> Here is a paragraph from Fevrier on Cree and Cherokee.
>
> "They both, in effect, have been devised by people who knew the Latin
> alphabet, obviously much simpler; if they have created, without
> realizing it, an archaic and outmoded form of script, it was
> certainly for reasons of an educational order, because the
> decomposition into vowels and consonants demands an effort of
> abstraction, whose difficulty all teachers know, while the
> separation of a word into its constituent syllables is more easily
> understood."

This point about syllabaries being easier to learn when first learning
to read and write has finally explained the strange concept of Thai
having 32 vowels to me. These are the 32 vowel (sensu lato -
latissimo?) combinations that can reasonably be presented in a
syllabary-like form. Anything normally needing a consonant symbol at
the end is omitted from the list.

True syllabaries may be fine for languages with limited vowel
inventories; they definitely creak when faced with larger vowel
inventories. That is when having decomposition into consonant and
vowel becomes a plus. Consonant clusters call for the extraction of
consonants, as indeed Cree has. Perhaps the syllable-based design of
hangul is to be commended, and is more than just an imitation of the
look and feel of Chinese characters.

Richard.