Re: Neosyllabaries

>In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:

>suzmccarth wrote
> > > 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.
> >
> > That is exactly what Fevrier and Cohen said about Indic scripts.
> > That always was the meaning of neosyllabism or secondary
> > syllabaries.
>
> Who, to paraphrase an earlier question of yours, suggested that it
> wasn't?
>
> > I cannot agree that Fevrier and Cohen's use of the term
>neosyllabary
> > or alphabet-syllabaire would in any way lead to the notion
> > of 'unidirectional' development.
>
> Who suggested that it would?

"the type has been called neosyllabary [Fevrier], pseudo-alphabet
[Householder], and semisyllabary [Diringer]. But these terms
misleadingly suggest that the abugida is a subtype or hybrid of
alphabet or syllabary - a notion that has led to unfortunate
historic/evolutionary notions about the history of writing."

WWS p. 4

My question is 'misleadingly suggests to whom'?

And how could a term for a post-alphabetic syllabary lead to these
unfortunate evolutionary notoions?

If someone had read Fevrier they would know that a neosyllabary
reflected prior discovery of the segments.

I honestly don't know the answer and have been trying to ask this in
one way or another since last year - so courteous please.

And if someone else has misunderstood a term, does that disqualify
it?

>Under what possible definition of "alphasyllabary" does Hangul
>qualify? (See WWS p. 4 n.

I wouldn't want to classify Hangul, it is just an exercise in
sounding silly as far as I can see, but the consonants and vowels
are not in linear order - and I am not too sure denoting vowels with
marks that are not of the same status as consonants is fundamental
to an alphasyllabary although Bright says it is. There are
independent vowels in Indic scripts so that seems a little tricky -
the vowel can be an akshara or syllable on its own.

However, all these scripts that we are discussing are based on
alphabetic (segmental) analysis and organized orthographically in
syllable units. I do find this organization relevant to cognitive
psychology.

> > That was a direct descendent of Taylor.
>
> As I explain in my IOS 20 article, Taylor did embrace Darwinism as

a

> model for the history of writing systems, but I don't think you'll

find

> him embracing "unidirectional development." I don't think it

occurred to

> him.

Does Darwinism imply 'unidirectional' development or not? A good
question for later. But I think most people understodd it that way.

BTW I do not claim to be a translator but it seemed more polite to
the forum as a whole to just write it out in English as I went
along - no accents either ;) any errors are not intentional - these
are not crafted translations - a gloss at best.

> > In effect, if the latter does not appear to be able to be

surpassed

> > as a system in the expression of the analysis of language, one

sees

> > that
> > systematic graphic combinations can be substituted for the
> > capricious evolved variety of the inheritied letters of the

past."

> >
> > Page 215 – 219
> >
> > Marcel Cohen
> > Grande Invention de L'Ecriture et son Evolution. 1958
>
> Assuming your translation is accurate, I don't see that his s.c.g.s
> refers to alphabets or "alphabetism," but rather to the extreme
> systematicity of Syllabics.

But combinations of what - vowels and consonants, surely.

The concept of 'prior alphabetic knowledge' is more developed in
Fevrier and Cohen's section on Indic scripts and the secondary
syllabary (alphabet-syllabaire) or neosyllabary.

> I'd say such rapture over Syllabics is unadvised, because it seems

to me

> the shapes are too similar for quick identification

The actual choice of shapes is another issue. I would personally
replace the Latin alphabet with the Greek one any day as far as
miniscules are concerned. Since I work with young children this is
a daily irritant to me. But teaching the segmentation of the
syllable into phonemes is a far more time consuming task.


Regards,

Suzanne McCarthy