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

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

wrote:

> > > Richard Wordingham wrote:
> > > >
> > > > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > Richard Wordingham wrote:
> >
> > > > > > Perhaps the critical thing about the most abugidas is that the
> > > > > > vowel marks' positions are usually scattered about the
> > > > > > consonant. How does the set of positions affect the
> > > > > > cognitive processes?

> So you say that the thing [neosyllabary] does not exist, but you

continue to use the

> name as a label for things. How is that supposed to be interpreted?

I don't believe ideal gases exist, either. That wouldn't stop me from
saying that one gas was more of an ideal gas than another.

> > Let us ignore marginal exceptions which have no bearing on the basic
>
> Which exceptions are we ignoring? Hard cases make bad law, but marginal
> data are often the most revealing data in linguistics (and probably
> elsewhere, too).

- Tamil 'x' (, 'ksha' or whatever you wish to call it.)
- CCV(C) syllables - not entirely naturalised, and not written as CCV(C)!

> > Native Tamil words have a (C)V(C) syllable structure. The
> > final C is written as base consonant plus pulli; the CV part is
> > written as base consonant alone, or base consonant plus vowel symbol.
> > Some of these combinations have sufficiently obscure forms that Tamil
> > is considered to be partly a neosyllabary as I understand the term.
>
> That doesn't help ...
>
> > Now suppose, as actually happened in one form of Old Tamil Brahmi,
> > that CV was always written as base consonant plus vowel symbol, and
> > the the final C were written as base consonant without additional
> > mark. For the sake of definiteness, let us further assume that the
> > vowel form for /a/ were identical to the actual pulli. (That is not
> > so very far from an actual Thai/Khmer symbol for short /a/ in closed
> > syllables, and does not change the percentage of vowels that are
> > indicated after the consonant.)

> Thai is not Khmer, and Thai/Khmer is not Tamil, but let that pass ...

And Coptic is not Greek? The corresponding Thai and Khmer vowel marks
are mostly very similar, and seem to have developed together. Thai,
Khmer and Tamil all developed from the Pallava script. I chose the
Thai and Khmer invention so as to maximise the plausibility of my
hypothetical scenario.

> > Should this hypothetical but plausible modification of Tamil have more
> > or less or fewer obscure combinations than actual Tamil?

> I have no idea what "obscure combinations" may be, but it sounds like
> you just described an alphabet. Like Lao.

Yes. But if I wanted to usefully describe the type of Lao, I would
describe it as an Indic (or Brahmi-derived) script with no inherent
vowels and next to no conjuncts. Should we launch a campaign to stop
people confusingly using the same term, 'alphabet', for such
dissimilar systems as Cyrillic and Lao? Korean at least has a regular
order; Lao feels higgledy-piggledy. (To be fair, I suppose you, Peter
Daniels, would not call hangul an alphabet, as it is the product of a
sophisticated 'grammatogeny'.)

My point is that the development of Tamil seems to have nothing to do
with its being an abugida as opposed to an 'alphabet'.

The obscure combinations have been listed as the combinations with /u/
and /u:/, and also /.ti/ and /.ti:/.

> > West Cree thus has an inherent vowel - /a/ -
> > and is thus an abugida!
>
> No, it's a "sophisticated grammatogeny," so it has no place in the
> typology.

Are you sure Brahmi wasn't a 'sophisticated grammatogeny'?

It occurred to me this morning that some of Larry Niven's readers may
be interpreting his alien names as written in an abugida! -
'Kzin(ti)', 'Kdapt', 'Kdatlyno'. The intrinsic vowel is schwa, and
occurs after the 'K' in these words. It's ambiguous with silence, but
those familiar with the system can generally work out where the
inherent vowel appears. As Patrick Chew pointed out for another
script, the inherent vowel occurs in the names of the latters -
'b'/b@/, 'c' /k@/, 'd' /d@/, and so on. :)