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

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

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