suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- 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.)

Havelock was an ignorant antisemitic nincompoop.

> 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

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...