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

> That's easy. In 1992, Bill Poser presented a paper at the LSA annual
> meeting in Philadelphia -- which has never even been written down, mush
> less published, and never will be (p.c. at Chicago LSA 1997) -- claiming
> that because Japanese phonology is best described using a moraic
> analysis (see Jim McCawley's dissertation, Tim Vance's expansion of that
> work, and Jim Unger's writings on both Japanese phonology and script),
> therefore all "syllabic" scripts except Yi should be called "moraic." I
> have no idea why Yi is excepted, but this is utter nonsense -- there is
> no phonological analysis whatsoever of, e.g., Akkadian or Greek to
> suggest that a "moraic" description suits the language better than a
> segmental description, so there is no reason to relabel the syllabaries
> as moraiaries.

I think the point is that in most syllabaries it may take more than
symbol to write a syllable. For Japanese, the extra symbol may
indicate length, a stop final or (though I'm not sure if this counts)
a final nasal.

The Yi syllabary is exceptional in that the symbol indicates initial
consonant, vowel and tone, and that that records all the segments and
the extra-segmental feature of the syllable.

For Akkadian Cuneiform, it generally takes 2 symbols for a closed or
explicitly long syllable begining with a consonant (3 for a closed
syllable with an explicitly long vowel).

Cree matches the kana system well enough - there is a length mark and
there are the finals.

If you can see Tamil as an alphasyllabary, it will probably apply to
Tamil by virtue of the syllable-final consonants.

I think the key point is that these scripts are not syllabaries
because the symbols fail to cover whole syllables - one needs multiple
symbols per syllable. Quite how one should reckon diacritics I'm not
sure - even the Yi syllabary has a diacritic, to convert a 3-tone
system to a 4-tone system. Possibly it is does not make the system
'moraic' because it does not introduce an extra sound, but simply
changes the sound, rather like the Japanese voicing marks. (In some
Yi 'dialects', the voicing contrast is or has migrated from the
initial consonant to the tone - 'tone-splitting'.)

Richard.