Re: Number of writing systems

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

Ed Vajda is a fantastically competent linguist, specializing in the
"Paleo-Siberian" languages as hardly anyone has done, and also familiar
with many other languages of the former Soviet Union.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...