Re: abugida vs abjad vs alphabet vs syllabary

Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>
> > Date:         Sat, 25 May 2002 22:11:31 -0400
> > From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
> >
> > 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.
>
>Also, Quenya mode does not have a mark to suppress the implicit vowel,
>and doesn't form conjuncts where it's missing --- of course those
>aren't necessary to the definition, but they are common features of
>abugidas when the language has a variety of syllable final consonants.
David Salo has written an article on the a-less mode, which may be
interesting to readers of this thread:

http://www.elvish.org/elm/spelling.html

                                                Andreas

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