Re: Neosyllabaries

Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- 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).

Yes, that's Bright's definition of "alphasyllabary."

> [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'.

Sproat has overlooked the distinction between "alphasyllabary" (formal)
and "abugida" (functional). Perhaps this is based on the faulty
"definition" of the latter that was found in the Unicode literature.

> 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 :)

Obviously, Constable has invented his own definition for
"alphasyllabary," which bears no relation to Bright's original.

> 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.

And, if you look at Bill's context, for him too. When we moved out of
India, to, say, hPags pa, it became clear that his definition was
deficient.

> 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?

The sole defining feature of an abugida is the inherent vowel. Bill
chose to make the defining feature of an alphasyllabary the use of
"diacritics" rather than full letters for denoting vowels. Functional
vs. formal.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...