suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> > No, it is not an alphabet. It is a sort of reverse abugida.
>
> I have recently just been thinking in terms of 'compositional syllabic
> notation' not to discount other terms - just to have something handy
> and simple for myself. (Simple - did I say that?;) )
>
> I would be very interested in hearing what you think of Rogers' book -
> it is not in the UBC library yet and it is definitely not on my
> shopping list.

Here it is, Copy/Pasted from a Word document, so if there are any
diacritics or special characters, they'll go away.

Writing systems: A linguistic approach. By HENRY ROGERS. (Blackwell
Textbooks in Linguistics 18.) Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Pp. xviii, 322. ISBN 0-631-23463-2 (hardcover). $74.95. / 0-631-23464-0
(paperback). $39.95.

This is the best available textbook for a course in writing systems, but
it is uneven. The core comprises eleven descriptive chapters, each on
one or a few scripts; each chapter concludes with a bibliographic
paragraph, a list of terms introduced, and well-conceived exercises.
Chapter 3, ‘Chinese’ (20–49), is extensive and detailed, though it is
odd to see ordinary English names festooned with pinyin tone marks, as
in Táiwa¯n. Chapter 4 treats ‘Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese’ in fewer
pages (50–78), more than half of them devoted to Japanese, so that the
entire Vietnamese alphabet is not even shown; moreover, a lot of space
is devoted to a rather forced analogizing of Jpn. on (borrowed) and kun
(native) readings of kanji (borrowed Chinese characters) to phenomena of
English spelling—which cannot even be skipped over, as it recurs
throughout the book. The only chapter where R seems not to have
consulted a specialist about details, 5 ‘Cuneiform’ (79–96), is
mercifully brief and cannot be relied on. Chapters 6, ‘Egyptian’
(97–114), and 7, ‘Semitic’ (115–44, mostly on Hebrew with a bit on
Arabic and even less on Ethiopic), are necessarily condensed. Chapters
8, ‘The Greek Alphabet’ (145–69, including both pre-alphabetic Greek
scripts and the Greek-derived alphabets of the Christian East); 9, ‘The
Roman Alphabet’ (170–84, including Finnish and Scots Gaelic); and 10,
‘English’ (185–98), are clear and accurate presentations of the history
of the Western alphabets (though the typesetter has made quite a hash of
the German Fraktur examples (182)). Chapter 11, ‘The Indian Abugida and
Other Asian Phonographic Writing’ (199–232), is uniquely and commendably
detailed (but of modern scripts it treats only Devanagari, Burmese, and
Tibetan, with a bit on Mongolian plus Bengali introduced in an
exercise). ‘Maya’ (chap. 12, 233–46), like so many accounts, devotes as
much space to the intricate but well understood calendar as it does to
the difficult logosyllabic writing system. Chapter 13, ‘Other Writing
Systems’ (247–68), includes Cherokee, Cree, runes, ogham, Pahawh Hmong,
and, unaccountably, Blissymbolics, an ideographic notation system that
is not writing.
Blissymbolics is not writing by R’s own definition (2), ‘the use of
graphic marks to represent specific linguistic utterances’. This appears
in chapter 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–8), a lightning survey of basic notions,
including the distinction between spoken and written language. Chapter
2, ‘Theoretical Preliminaries’ (9–19), introduces a number of technical
terms, including the indefensible grapheme ‘a contrastive unit in a
writing system’ (10). (Why are the characters of Chinese considered
graphemes (28), rather than the recurring phonetic and semantic
components of characters? or even the seven basic brushstrokes with
which they are written?) Chapter 14, ‘Classification of Writing Systems’
(269–79), presents some traditional classifications and those offered by
John DeFrancis and Richard Sproat. In his own classification, R
commendably uses the terms abjad (consonantary) and abugida
(Indic-style, where the basic letter denotes Ca and other vowels are
denoted by added marks) introduced by this reviewer (J. Am. Orient. Soc.
110 [1990]: 727–31)—but claims abugida as his own contribution (274) and
fails to describe the clarifications of the history of writing that the
distinctions embodied by the two terms made possible.
Two recurrent annoyances mar the book. One is the mere idiosyncrasy of
naming the calendar eras ‘OLD’ and ‘NEW’ (xvii) instead of BCE and CE
(or BC and AD). This is especially confusing the first time it appears
(21), anent the periodization of Chinese, adjacent to ‘Old Chinese’! The
other is quite serious. On the basis of a now mythic talk at the 1992
LSA by William Poser, never published and (pers.comm.) never even to be
written down, R claims that all scripts (except Yi) traditionally called
syllabaries, including Japanese kana, Greek Linear B, and Mesopotamian
cuneiform, are in fact moraic scripts. A moraic analysis of Japanese
phonology is legitimate, but no phonological analysis of any Semitic
language has justified the claim that e.g. Akkadian is written with a
cuneiform moraography.
The book is rounded out with appendixes containing an introduction to
linguistic concepts (280–84), the IPA (285–86), English transcription
(287–88), and a glossary (289–99); bibliography (300–9); and index
(310–22). Great care has not been exercised in matters bibliographic:
the Koreanist Ho-Min Sohn is consistently misspelled, Edward Chiera’s
They Wrote on Clay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938) is
repeatedly mentioned as … in Clay and dated 1966, and even I. J. Gelb’s
seminal A Study of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952,
2nd ed. 1963) is attributed to 1964 (275). [Peter T. Daniels, Jersey
City, NJ]

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...