Re: Neosyllabaries

suzmccarth wrote:

> > In truth, no other kind of writing system has ever developed out of a
> > syllabary.
>
> >
> > (Which is why it's so important to recognize that abugidas are not
> > syllabaries -- not that anything has developed out of them either
> >except
>
> But in Fevrier and Cohen the alphabet-syllabaire or neosyllabary
> develops out of the consoantal alphabet. It is a secondary syllabry.

No. Stop thinking of abugidas as syllabaries!

They are utterly different from syllabaries, in that they reflect the
prior discovery of the "segment" -- that things smaller than syllables,
such as consonants and vowels, can be analyzed from the speech stream.

> However, if one doesn't recognize these systems as some kind of
> syllabary then some understanding is lost. They are post-alphabetic
> syllabaries.

They are "syllabaries" only in that the level of speech that they encode
is the syllable.

> Fevrier and Cohen make it clear that neosyllabaries are built out of
> alphabetic analysis and come after the development of this
> knowledge.

Of course. Panini etc. are generations (if not centuries) earlier than
Indic writing, and the Aramaic consonantary-plus-matres was before their
eyes. By the time the standard order of the Kharoshthi vowel matras is
attested [announced by Rich Salomon at AOS], they may have been
influenced by Greek as well (because the order is (a) e i o u -- I asked
if this could reflect Latin rather than Greek but he says there's no way
they could have known the roman alphabet yet).

> > in very rare circumstances, viz., apparently, Lao and a couple of
> > abortive experiments
>
> What are those - the Bhattirollu?

One has to come across them serendipitously leafing through Salomon --
if they're indexed as such in his book, I don't know what they're under.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...