Re: Neosyllabaries

Ph. D. wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels skribis:
> >
> > suzmccarth wrote:
> > >
> > > "Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
> > > > When has a syllabary ever evolved from an alphabet?
> > >
> > > The Potawatomi syllabary? :)
> > >
> > >
> http://www.potawatomilang.org/Reference/Grammar/Orthography/writingsyst.html
> >
> > Bad URL
> >
> > What is The Potawatomi syllabary?
> >
> > If there were such a thing, Hockett would have known about it, since he
> > described Potawatomi for his dissertation in 1938.
>
> That URL worked for me. Anyway, it's not really a syllabary. It's just
> digraphs of Latin letters laid out in a table like this:
>
> ba be bi bo bu
> ca ce ci co cu
> da de di do du
> ga ge gi go gu etc.
>
> The text on the web page says it was taught as a syllabary, but as
> far as writing systems go, this is not a syllabary. It's simply the Latin
> alphabet.

Although, (stretched out with sinuous intonation), if the language has
no consonant clusters, the learner would never need to learn to divide
them.

But, since it's Central Algonquian, that seems highly unlikely.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...