--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Anton Sherwood <bronto@...> wrote:

> >> suzmccarth wrote:
> >>> . . . . However, isn't a writing system featural only
> >>> if the basic set of units are featural. I can't think
> >>> of any that actually are. . . .
>
> > "Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
> >> In chronological order: Hangul. Pitman. Visible Speech. Gregg.
>
> suzmccarth wrote:
> > And Shavian?
>
> and tengwar?

Thanks, both. I checked Tengwar out on Omniglot and it looks more
featural than Shavian which is only marginally featural. Visible
Speech is very much so. Gregg is more analyzable than Pitman.

I actually thought at first that Syllabics was called 'featural' in
Unicode because there are markings for vowel length, labialization
and preaspiration, although these are not all used in the
traditional orthography.

However, Michael, you say that it is because "regular rotations and
superscription of base characters was a regular way of indicating
relationships"

This mixes 'rotations', which represent vowels, therefore at the
alphabetic level, with superscriptions, this must be the vowel
length marker, at the featural level.

For Syllabics, basic units of representation are syllable level
graphs, analyzable by shape for consonants, and by orientation
(rather than rotation) for vowels - could it be called an
alphasyllabary?

Suzanne