Re: Basque & Katzner's Languages of the World

On Thu, 15 Nov 2001 22:25:27 -0500, John Cowan <cowan@...>
wrote:

>Nik Taylor scripsit:
>
>> Well, if alphabet must be arbitrary shapes representing sounds, then
>> yes.  But, seeing as how Hangul is based on phonetic principles, there
>> is a kind of logic in calling it another category, "Featural code".  Of
>> course, that would make a category with only one member.  :-)  So, I
>> personally would also consider it an alphabet.
>
>Well, Gregg and Pitman shorthand are featural; arguably, so is
>Tengwar, although at a higher level it's an abjad.
And there's nothing wrong with having a category with only one member; it
happens frequently in biology. There's nothing much like an aardvark, so it
has a whole order all to itself.

But if you're including Tengwar, you should also mention Cirth. I forget
whether there's any logic to the vowels, but at least the consonants were
designed according to a feature-based system (and yet it still manages to
look like a runic script!)

In addition to Visible Speech (and Shavian to a lesser extent), there've
been other examples of "featural" scripts (I've designed a few of them
myself, the most successful of which is Ljoerr-teg). But I'd guess that
Hangul (and the shorthand systems you mention) are probably the only ones
in widespread use.

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