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

> suzmccarth wrote:
>
> No. The important thing is to recognize _how different_ they are --

for

> a century they were all lumped together as "syllabaries,"

Permit me to ask which century.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 1948, lumps them all together as
alphabets. It explicitly says that the Brahmi alphabets are derived
from the south semitic group of alphabets.

I have variously seen them refered to as syllabic alphabets,
alphabet-syllabaire, neosyllabaire, etc. also semisyllabary and of
course, alphasyllabary.

I have _never_ seen Indic scripts refered to as syllabaries, except,
in that I say they _have_ a syllabary, by which I do not mean the
same thing.

Does Gelb label Indic scripts as unqualified syllabaries? I never
could finish his book.

I find the accepted thinking was that Brahmi was a post-alphabetic
syllabic script. But people found that awkward to remember after
reading about unidirectional development.

Then Sampson was trying to do the good thing by saying that there is
only the logographic and phonographic, and that alphabetic and
syllabic as phonographic types are equally suitable for literacy and
modernity and thank goodness he said that - someone had to. But it
didn't give us a classification.

Diringer said that scripts are either syllabic or alphabetic but
then he switched back to logographic and phonographic because after
all early logosyllabaries are so interesting.

If the syllable is the most basic and stable element of speech as
automatic speech recognition programs are finding, then it is
natural that writing returned to syllabism even after segmentation
was known.

By syllabism I mean representation of the syllable, not unanalysable
representation of the syllable.

> > Why not say that there are two different stages of syllabic-type
> > scripts, one before discovery of the segment and one after? That
> > would finally get rid of the historic sequence mess which keeps
> > getting passed around. It would focus on what is actually

fundamental

> > the syllable vs the segment.
>
> Because that is not factually true.

What part of this is not true?

Suzanne