Re: Number of writing systems

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> > "Featural syllabary" could be a portmanteau description of Korean.
>
> Featural just makes me think of Jakobson and Halle, their attmept at
> binary features, acoustic not articulatory, etc. The word feature,
> for me is irretrievably connected to memorizing Ladefoged (not
> binary however)for an exam.

Chin-Wu Kim and Geoffrey Sampson independently came up with the label
"featural" for Korean writing. Kim said it first, but Sampson got in
into print first.

It simply means that the script denotes phonetic features. The Jakobson,
Fant, and Halle 1951 features turned out not to be all that useful, but
the notion of binary features turned out to be quite useful -- see
Halle's Sound Pattern of Russian (1959) and everything based on it, such
as SPE and all its more realistic descendants.

> So for me featural seems to relate to phonetics rather than
> phonemics, or at least to be more like the IPA, not related to any
> particular language, ie not langauge specific. That is my
> association for 'featural'.

The notion of "phoneme" has no place in Hallean phonology.

> > Who considers him obscure??
>
> Evidently they don't, I was wrong there.
>
> > Hmm, where were you when I was going through that?
>
> I had at that time figured out how to google into Unicode but I had
> not figured out how to operate the table of contents, so I couldn't
> read it in any connected way.
>
> I should mention, since you once asked how long I had been using
> usenet, whatever that is, that joining qalam was the first time I
> had used the internet.

Golly.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...