Re: Neosyllabaries

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> > suzmccarth wrote:
> > >
> > > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> > > 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.
>
> I cannot find or recall seeing any article or book on writing
> systems for this time period that lumped Indic scripts with Japanese
> as syllabaries. I have checked Encyclopedia Brittanica for the
> early, middle and more recent entries of this century.
>
> > suzmccarth wrote
> > > 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?
>
> 1. "Alphabet", B. F. C. Atkinson, 1948, (first published in 1929)
> Encyclopedia Brittanica, volume 1, pages 677 – 685.
>
> On page 678 there is a table entitled "Chart Illustrating the
> Presumed Development of the Modern Alphabet from the Brahmi Letters
> of India".

Imagine, they carried this folly for 20 years. Did you check Atkinson's
credentials in the list of contributors?

> Within the table, certain columns are labeled `After Buehler'
> and 'After Euting'. This table appears in the historical section
> discussing `various theories' which have been proposed but not
> accepted.
>
> On page 684, a tree diagram shows the derivation of the Indian
> Alphabets in this way. Proto-Semitic > South Semitic > Sabaean >
> Brahmi(?) > Indian Alphabets.
>
> In the text, page 683, for the Brahmi alphabet, "there seems little
> doubt that it derives from the South Semitic group of alphabets".
>
> 2. "Writing", EB, D. Olson, 1960's ?) Under the heading "Indian

Olson's article replaced Gelb's -- not for the better -- in 1988, and he
is credited as coauthor of Diringer's former "Alphabets" from then on.

> Alphabets" he says "It is obvious, however, that on the whole it was
> the idea of alphabetic writing that was transmitted and that the
> fully developed Brahmi writing was the outcome of brilliant
> philological and phonological elaboration of the scientific Indian
> school." (He also mentions the descent of Brahmi from the Aramaic
> alphabet.)
>
> However, at the end of this section Olson adds, "All these Indian
> and Southeast Asian scripts involve types of semi-syllabaries rather
> than alphabets. They consist of vowels and diphthongs and basic
> consonants. (i.e. consonants followed by a short a) there are no
> pure consonants ( i.e. consonants written by themselves)".

Why are you attributing Gelb's words (if you're looking at "Writing") or
Diringer's (if you're looking at "Alphabet") to Olson?

> 3. "Writing, Forms of", EB, I. Gelb, 1981, lists 4 types of
> syllabaries - cuneiform, west Semitic, Cypriot and Japanese. He
> lists 3 types of alphabet - Type I - Greek, Latin and so on; Type
> II - Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic and so on; and Type III – Indic,
> Ethiopic.
>
> He later add "When the vowels are indicated (as in Type II) then the
> combination of the consonant sign plus the vowel mark may be treated
> as a syllabic unit. This is even more apparent in Type III (Indic,
> Ethiopic) with its obligatory indication of vowels by means of
> vowel marks that are permanently attached to the consonant signs or
> by an internal modification in the form of the consonant sign."

This was published in the 14th ed. before it was reused in the 15th ed.
in 1974 (he gave me an offprint of the 15th-ed. version), but I have not
been able to discover what year it was published. It is _almost_
word-for-word from A Study of Writing, but is changed in some crucial
lines about Indic and Korean.

> Overall I find a very consistent classification of Indian scripts
> throughout this century as alphabets. When I wrote a survey paper on
> writing systems in 1984 I wrote that there were 3 contemporary
> syllabaries mentioned in the literature - Japanese, Cherokee and
> Vai.
>
> I am not aware of anything written about writing systems that
> contradicted this except for Fevrier and Cohen's use of the word
> neosyllabary. Cohen, in particular, who went to Abyssinia to study
> Ethiopic, wrote about the alphabet-syllabaire.
>
> I would be very interested in seeing a reference to the Indic
> scripts which classifies them as syllabaries.

Most books on writing said nothing at all about Indic, simply referring
the reader to Taylor. Most encyclopedia articles on writing didn't say
even that much.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...