--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:

> Scribner and Cole write an entire book without acknowledging that
> segmenting syllables into segments is different from segmenting
> speech into syllables! They don't want to consider the fact that

Vai

> is a syllabary as a factor.

In Psychology of Literacy, 1981, Scribner and Cole do discuss
whether the Vai syllabary is 'inefficient' refering to something
Havelock said about nonalphabetic scripts. However, they then say
that "Havelock's analysis was carried out with respect to
prealphabetic syllabaries and may not accurately characterize
contemporary scripts."p.239 (Vai is however, a non-analytic
syllabary for the most part.)


They do, however, write about the fact that the orthography is not
standardized, tone is not represented and there are no word
boundaries. Because of this, text must be read aloud several times
to create meaning. Otherwise the syllabary is systematic, by which
they seem to mean complete and accounting for all the phonological
combinations.

So they do discuss the fact that it is a syllabary but the
discussion is, I think, incomplete. My only point here is that this
study is hampered by a lack of a basis for how syllabaries and
alphabets contrast.


http://www.omniglot.com/writing/vai.htm

Suzanne