Re: Number of writing systems

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- 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.

How not? Why do you say phonetic not phonemic?

> >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.

Hunh? The shapes of Hangul, Pitman, Visible Speech, and Gregg correspond
to phonetic features. What's that got to do with Morris Halle's
derailment of phonology?

> 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.

Don't axe _me_ what it's supposed to mean!

You'd probably be better off never to look in whatever Unicode document
you're looking in. They really don't seem to have known what they were
doing; they just made it up as they went along.

Engineers, not scientists, one might say.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...