Re: Number of writing systems

--- suzmccarth <suzmccarth@...> wrote:

> --- 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

Except that Spanish only uses the tilde on ñ in which
case it denotes palatalizatio. Portuguese does indeed
use the tilde for nasalization however. I'm sure
everybody on this list knows this even if the writer
on pandora.cii.wwu.edu does not.

Andrew Dunbar.

> Suzanne
>
>
>

http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl



___________________________________________________________
To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com