Re: abugida vs abjad vs alphabet vs syllabary

Raymond Brown scripsit:

> But the Tengwar don't have an implicit vowel, do they?  There seem to me
> rather an abjad but, unusually for an abjad, vowels are always made
> explicit.
>
> I would be interested to read what John has to say on the matter.
I think that the occasional omission of the a-tehta in Quenya writing
does not make the Tengwar an abugida.  In true abugidas, there *is*
no sign for the implicit vowel.  It is an abjad that uses its vowel
marks almost, but not quite, always.  BTW, in the other languages
that use the Arabic script or have done so in the past, are there
any where the use of vowel marks was similarly mandatory?

An additional point, FWIW, is that our alphabet arose out of an
abjad; no abugida AFAWK has ever arisen from an abugida.  Tengwar
full mode is of course an alphabet.

> Another thing I've wondered is whether "Dirk's syllabary" is really a
> syllabary or an abugida or a 'modified abjad'.  Like an abugida, the
> characters do contain an implicit vowel, what Dirk called the "resting
> vowel", but unlike standard abigidas, this resting vowel is not the same
> for all consonants; there is a difference between 'high vowel' syllabics
> and 'low vowel' syllabics, thus:
I think it's an abugida.  There are abugidas (like Myanmar) where
consonant differences that formerly represented voicing have come
to carry tone information instead, so the notion that the consonant
difference could carry vowel-height information is not absurd.

BTW, Babm [boabomu] is written in a Latin-derived syllabary (definitely
not an abugida, and not, I think, an abjad either, though it would
be possible to make such a case -- that the vowels are not written
in CV syllables because they are overdetermined).

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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