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

> I presume that 'eliminating aksaras' means that there are no
> consonant sequences behaving as single consonants. Tamil syllable
> structure guarantees that the only possile ones are those for which
> the phonetic and orthographic structures conflict. The almost
> complete elimination of conjuncts almost completely removes this
> conflict.

So there may be some exceptions because of borrowing from Hindi but
usually the syllable structure is CV-C-CV but never C-CV. The
consonant plus pulli can never be used to create an initial syllable
beginning with 2 consonants. The syllable in Indic can be CCV or CV-C
but not C-CV. So ksha is a CCV syllable and that is allowed but not
a really natural Tamil construction. The pr and br sequences are
written with PI-RI or BI-RI or even different vowels depending on the
following syllable. It was suggested that this is because of
pronunciation but from what I read in Tamil forums this is simply
disallowed in the writing system.

In this sense it is the consonant that is not independent of the
vowel. The writer or reader can add a dead consonant to a preceding
syllable but they cannot start a word with a consonant unless it is
already attached to the syllable as in an akshara.

In Cree the stand alone consonants are syllable final - they are
finals. The 'h' is a bit anamolous but that has been influenced by
non-native linguists. I wouldn't be lining this up with the computer
encoding of the script but with the requirements for handwriting the
script. In some languages an 's' may precede a syllable but that is
why I mentioned that liquids or continuants might not fit into the
basic CV rules. Inuktitut has also undergone many orthography
reforms which may mena that it breaks these rules but originally it
did fit the CV-C rule. It even first was used as a CV-CV-CV
structure. The appearance of these scripts now can reflect a lot of
influence form linguists to 'phonemicize' it.

> I think decomposability is an important issue.

Decomposability is very important - but not _more_ important than the
arrangement into a syllable.

>Don't forget that
> scripts can be mixed, e.g. the logograms commonly used for numbers.
> One may have a mix of pure-syllabary-like items (your example would
> be the u(:)ksharas of Tamil) and alphasyllabary items.

There is only one CV combination in Tamil where the vowel actually
follows the consonant out of 12, so it is very difficult to establish
a one-to-one mapping for vowels and consonants before the age of 12.
Piaget, I think. Certain devlopmental factors to do with form
constancy etc. intervene and segmentation is not normally established
without explicit teaching of the various syllable structures. The
writing system does not provide visual reinforcement for segmenting
into phonemes.

Suzanne