Re: Neosyllabaries

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> >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'?

To the writers of most introductory linguistics textbooks, who have no
interest in writing systems but now feel obligated to include a mention
of them, and simply copy a reference to Gelb from one to another. That
was written more than a decade ago, you must recall.

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

Because it's not a friggin' syllabary at all.

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

How many American linguists (a) read books on writing systems (b) in
French?

> 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?

When a non-misunderstandable term was readily available or coinable,
yes.

> >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.

"Alphasyllabary" is Bill Bright's word (he says he saw it somewhere but
no one has found an earlier occurrence outside his own writings), so he
can define it however he wishes. But you said that Hangul is an
alphasyllabary.

> 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.

Darwin himself recognized that there is nothing teleological about
evolution. Of course it's not reversible.

> 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.

Combinations of anything. Again I ask what he said about Hangul -- which
uses "combinations" of features, not of consonants and vowels.

> 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.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...