--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

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

wrote:

> > 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).)
>
> 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'.

THis is an article I refered to last year but did not then take the
time to quote properly. This is what I read about Tamil. I am not
quite sure what Sproat means about eliminating asksaras but
definitely there are no consonant conjuncts in Tamil and there is no
orthographic syllable in the sense of Devanagari.

Tamil does frequently start with a vowel as the first _written_
phoneme although as Mr. Daniels pointed out these are phonetically
preceded by a a y/j/ or w/v/. This phonetic phenomenon has written
expression between vowels, so 'visual basic' is written in
Tamil 'visuval basic'. Nontheless independant written vowels
frequently occur word initial.

TAMIL
"From a formal point of view, Tamil (Steever, 1996; Radhakrishnan,
2002) is probably the simplest Indic script since it has eliminated
the
aksara as a fundamental unit of the script. Virtually all consonant
conjuncts
have been eliminated, and consonant sequences are written leftto-
right with unligatured consonant symbols. Steever (1996, page 426)
suggests that this trend may have been related to the introduction of
typography from the West

… the SLU in Tamil is a maximally CV(V) unit, with the possibilities
being V(V) (syllable initial short or long vowel), C (consonant-
sequence-medial consonant)
and CV(V) (consonant with diacritic short or long vowels). Ignoring
for the moment the decomposability of CV(V) elements and the fact
that there are simplex vowel glyphs representing both long and short
vowels, Tamil orthography is almost what I termed in (Sproat, 2000) a
core syllabary, like Japanese kana. Tamil is moving towards being an
alphasyllabic version of kana.

If the SLU is the CV(V) unit, not an orthographic syllable, the
theory
predicts that vowel diacritics in Tamil can only attach to the final
consonant
in a consonant sequence. …

Tamil seems to be evolving towards kana in another regard, namely
that the
CV(V) units are becoming unanalyzable." p.22

http://compling.ai.uiuc.edu/rws/newindex/indic.pdf

Now from my reading of this text I would expect that there might be
some similarities in the cognitive process of reading Tamil and
reading Japanese. This is my main interest but not the only one.

Ancestry is not so important, not even the label or definition but
that scripts with similar pertinent features be classed together. So
scripts would be classed as having syllabic organization because
that is a useful feature to know.

> One might object that an alphasyllabary should preferentially
> partition CVCCV as CV-CCV.

I don't see how that applies to Tamil either. Like Cree, Tamil has
the V or CV (long or short vowels) unit followed by an optional C.
However this C is not attached to anything in either case. So I
think the partition is CV-C-CV.

Regards,

Suzanne

>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.