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

> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> > If he doesn't
> > require alphasyllabaries to be abugidas, we can forget about

'Bright-2'.

> He thought that the two terms were alternatives, and then we discovered
> that his doesn't cover hPags pa, which showed that it was not only
> etymologically unsuitable, but it also didn't have the same semantic
> range.

The latter discrepancy suits us fine. Suzanne's interest in
neosyllabaries seems to relate to how writing systems work, rather
than their ancestry. Being an abugida may be very relevant for a
vowel-poor language (e.g. Pali and many 1st millenium Austronesian
languages), but becomes a curiosity in a vowel-rich language and then
an embarassment when the virama or its functional equivalent is abandoned.

An interesting functional subtlety is the difference between Tamil
with its virama, and Thai where the implicit vowels include the null
vowel.

Sproat's interpretation raised an interesting side-issue. He referred
to the idea of all the pertinent phonetic contrasts being explicitly
recorded by separate elements. If a voicing contrast, indicated by
different letters for each member of an unvoiced/voiced pair, becomes
a vowel register contrast, and then induces a tone split (as in the
Tai languages) or two series of vowels written alike and pronounced
differently (as in Khmer), is the nature of the relationship between
language and script changed?

> > If we don't require alphasyllabaries to be abugidas, then I think
> > Korean qualifies. Every syllable character begins with a consonant
> > symbol, and the vowel may be to its right or below it, thus
> > subordinating the vowel to the consonant.
>
> ??
>
> How is the V any more "subordinate" to the C than the C is to the V?
> Neither can occur without the other. You could even say the V is more
> important because it demands an empty consonant symbol if it's
> syllable-initial.

It makes more sense to say that the consonant symbol is so crucial
that a symbol is required even if there is none pronounced. The
consonant symbol gets the prime position.

Do all the Brahmi family that don't use independent vowels for native
words prohibit vowel-initial words? Most if not all Brahmi family
scripts of mainland SE Asia have what appears to be a glottal stop
consonant which is used in preferences to independent vowels for
native words.

Richard.