suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- 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.

Ca. 1890 to 1990.

> 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.

Author?

Was that the article ("Alphabet") that has a chart whose legend says
that it demonstrates that all the alphabets of Europe are derived from
the alphabet of India?

> 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.

Your reading has not extended to popular treatments of writing systems.

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

He has almost nothing to say about India.

> 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.

His book is "The Alphabet." Anything else he mentions is incidental to
his concern with the family tree rooted in Proto-Sinaitic.

> 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.

What does "natural" mean?

> 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?

"there are two different stages of syllabic-type scripts, one before
discovery of the segment and one after."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...