Re: Number of writing systems

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

> 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.

Thanks for this history. That helps a lot. I never thought of
looking in Sampson for the origins of this term.

> It simply means that the script denotes phonetic features.

But surely not a relationaship between graph and sound patterns 'at
the phonetic level', Hangul doesn't do that.

>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 that's why we had to learn it.

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

Which is why 'featural' is such a misleading label for a writing
system.

Unicode lumps Ethiopic, Syllabics and Hangul together as 'featural
syllabaries'. Does that make sense? I have never heard Syllabics
called featural before and it makes my job difficult as I am trying
to write about Syllabics and explain where all the different labels
for it come from.

Suzanne