Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- 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.

Yes, both /Q/ and /N/ are called moras.

> 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'.)

What does the number of symbols involved in notating a syllable have to
do with whether a phonological system is organized moraically?

Can only written language have moras?

There are in Mesoptamian cuneiform plenty of CVC signs.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...