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

> suzmccarth wrote:
>
> > The interest for me in Taylor's work is in providing an historical
> > context for teaching method of Hangul. For some people it is
> > definitely an abstract alphabet but for others possibly an
> > alphasyllabary.
>
> Under what possible definition of "alphasyllabary" does Hangul qualify?
> (See WWS p. 4 n. *, and also Bill Bright's article published both in an
> early issue of *Written Language and Literacy* and in the King Sejong
> number of *Studies in the Linguistic Sciences* (Urbana).)

A. According to Kuipers (
http://home.gwu.edu/~kuipers/kuipers%20insular%20seasia%20scripts.pdf ):

The Indic scripts of Insular Southeast Asia are similar to what
Bright calls an alphasyllabary. He defines these as scripts in
which "each consonant-vowel sequence is a unit, called an aksara,
[and] in which the vowel symbol functions as an obligatory
diacritic to the consonant" (Bright 1996).

[I apologise if this is a duplicate post. I was asked to confirm my
password when I posted before, and did not get the usual message that
my posting had been sent.]

B. Richard Sproat ( http://compling.ai.uiuc.edu/rws/newindex/indic.pdf
)interprets this as, 'They are alphasyllabic scripts (Bright, 1996a)
(though Daniels (1996) prefers the term abugida), meaning that they
are basically segmental in that almost all segments are represented in
the script, yet the fundamental organizing principle of the script is
the (orthographic) syllable'.

C. alphasyllabary: two levels of structural unit representing
phonemes and syllables (prototypical example: Hangul) (Peter
Constable, quoted by Suzanne in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/2783 )

Obviously hangul qualifes as an alphasyllabary under definition C :)

Have I missed something in these quotes? Neither (A) nor (B) requires
an implicit/inherent vowel, which Peter Daniels sees as an essential
feature of an abugida.

Where does Hangul fail to meet these definitions? The first
possibility is having CVC in a syllable. Does this disqualify
Devanagari when homorganic nasals are written using anusvara? One
then has distinct consonant, (vowel), consonant elements! I think
not. But perhaps CVC is only to be permitted as an atypical construction.

The old Dai Lanna script is an abiguda, as far as I can make out.
However, it has plenty of CVC syllables - consonants can be subjoined
to the /aa/ dependent vowel, which is written on the right of the
consonant, though in many cases it is not immediately clear whether
one is reading CVC or CCV - one has to use one's knowledge of the
phonotactics of the language, including whether a word is [+Pali] or
[-Pali], which affects the spelling. Dai Lanna does have some
pathological CVCV syllables - I've just seen <bya:dhi> (Indic-based
transliteration) laid out as <b><subscript y><dependent aa><subscript
dh><dependent i>, though the word is probably just two syllables - /pa
yaat/ (tones omitted through ignorance) with first vowel anaptyctic (<
Pali _bya:dhi_ or Pali & Sanskrit _vya:dhi_). The dependent i is
written as a superscript to the dependent aa, as though the dependent
aa were a consonant! A more typical CVCV case is <baimaa>, laid out
in 3 columns as <dependent ai, written to the left><b><subscript
m><dependent aa>.

One might object that an alphasyllabary should preferentially
partition CVCCV as CV-CCV. In that case Thai fails, for it partitions
as CV-C-CV, e.g. <ma.n.do> (short for _Ma.n.d.oda:ri:_, name of
Ravanna's widow in the Ramayana), laid out as <m><.n><o><.d> -
CV-C-CV, rather than *<m><o><.n><.d>, the CV-CCV analysis.

So, unless not all abugidas are alphasyllabaries, by what criterion
does Hangul fail to be an alphasyllabary?

Richard.