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Re: NATLANG: Chinese parts of speech (or lack thereof)

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 10, 2004, 15:43
Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>:

> On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 14:59:33 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> > wrote: > > > Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>: > > > >> On Mon, 09 Aug 2004 13:59:43 -0400, John Cowan > >> <jcowan@...> > >> wrote: > >> > >> > In the meantime, various other systems have been devised more or less > >> > independently: these turn out to always be syllabic. > >> > >> Although arguably in the less-independent column, there are Sorang > >> Sompeng > >> (an abugida), Ol Cemet' (an alphabet), and Varang Kshiti (which is a > >> defective abugida), all invented for minority languages in India. > > > > "Defective" abugida? How does that work? > > The unmarked vowel may be any of "a", "e" or "o", even though the script > has characters for all three vowels, as well as the other vowels needed > for the underlying language (called "Ho"). For all I know, that might be > structurally sound according to the needs of the Ho language, but it's not > the normal behaviour in abugidas, and is an underspecification rather than > an overspecification, so I called it defective.
Is there a virama? If not, it sounds more like a abjad were some vowel marks are mandatory and some not. Is there a zero consonant? Andreas

Reply

Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>Varang Kshiti script description (was Re: NATLANG: Chinese parts of speech (or lack thereof))