--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

>
> If you think about it you might suppose that it must have been
> because someone thought that regular rotations and superscription
> of
> base characters was a regular way of indicating relationships.

By now every linguistics prof has their class notes on the internet
and this is what they look like.

"In some writing systems individual phonetic features do receive
their own specific graphic representation, and both syllabaries and
alphabets may have this featural quality to varying degrees
(Japanese use of '' to denote voicing, Spanish tilda for
nasalization.) The English alphabet does not have any such featural
markers. Korean Hangul shows the most extensive example of featural
representation and might be considered a featural system as well as
an alphabet."

http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/Writing1.htm

Suzanne