Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
> > Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> > > 2. One development process is abjad > abugida > neosyllabary (though
> > > he may not accept that the last stage has actually happened).
>
> > What do _you_ mean by "neosyllabary"?
>
> I'm not convinced that there is actually any such beast. It's a

Then why did you use the word?

> syllabary (in so much as a non-kana like Cree is a syllabary) in which
> the abugida / pointed abjad / alphabetic features are so obscured that
> it is sensibly treated as a kana. It may be that the difference
> between, say, an abugida and a neosyllabary depends on the user's
> background - a Tamil child might only see a neosyllabary, whereas a
> graduate may see an abugida with some unpredictable ligatures and even
> some that are opaque. To me, the latter isn't very different from what
> happens in combining consonants to form an akshara - or for that
> matter, the forms of some subscript consonants in SE Asian scripts.

So you don't have a definition for the term; if you don't have a use for
it, stop using it.

Or, if you're groping toward some additional concept, then come up with
a new word for it.

> > > It makes a nonsense of PTD's scheme to call an abugida or Korean a
> > > syllabary; I believe that is why he regards it as 'necessary' to
> > > restrict the meaning of the term. (An alternative would be to find a
> > > more precise name for what he regards as a syllabary.)
> >
> > You wanna call it a kana? Fine. Then Cherokee has a kana and Cree
> > doesn't.
>
> I have some qualms about using the word 'kana' (katakana and hiragana
> do have some common features that other syllabaries do not), but apart
> from that, fine. And you are right about Cherokee and Cree.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...