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

From:    John Cowan <jcowan@...>
> c) reusing some of the consonant symbols to represent vowels: this led to
> the Greek alphabet and the descendant alphabets Latin, Gothic, Armenian,
> Georgian, Coptic, Cyrillic.
Nitpick:  of these, only Latin, Coptic, Cyrillic and to a certain
extent Gothic were descendents of the Greek alphabet.  Georgian
and Armenian were, as far as anyone can tell, only inspired by
the idea of an alphabet, while their actual structural properties
(sign-shapes and so on) bore little relation to Greek.  In this
respect, Georgian is more like of Greek than Armenian.

(Thomas Gamqrelidze has an article about this in the festschrift
to Howard Aronson.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637