Re: abugida vs abjad vs alphabet vs syllabary

At 10:11 pm -0400 25/5/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond Brown scripsit:
[snip]
>no sign for the implicit vowel.  It is an abjad that uses its vowel
>marks almost, but not quite, always.
Thanks.

>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?
The books I have on Hausa, Farsi and Urdu are not explicit on this point.
Farsi, indeed, doesn't appear to write short vowels, but only yje long
ones. However, from all the examples given, it does appear that the vowels
that may be written _must_ be written, unlike in Arabic itself.  This is,
indeed, what I'd expect when a non-Semitic language gets written in the
Arabic script.

>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.
An interesting point.

>> Another thing I've wondered is whether "Dirk's syllabary" is really a
>> syllabary or an abugida or a 'modified abjad'.
[snip]

>
>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.
I hope not, indeed.

>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).
I agree, definitely not an abugida.  It is surely a syllabary.

Certainly the Latin-derived syllabries I experimented with in my late teens
and early 20s were syllabaries because not merely were the vowels
'overdetermined' in CV syllables, there was no way they could've been
written.

Ray.

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Speech is _poiesis_ and human linguistic articulation
is centrally creative.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
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