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Re: Abugidas (was: Chinese writing systems)

From:Florian Rivoal <florian@...>
Date:Thursday, November 7, 2002, 8:16
>Florian Rivoal writes: > > >This sounds more like a featural syllabary, like Hangul. > > > > Hangul is not at all a syllabary. It is definitly an alphabet. You > > can be tricted because characters are grouped by syllab, but it is > > only visual. > > > >I'm not sure that that's a meaningful distinction. You can equally >view each grouping as a regularly constructed syllabic character - >this is how Korean fonts work. It's generally considered an alphabet, >but I've seen reference books that refer to it a syllabary.
Is english considered ideographic because you group the letter by words, and thus, if you consider a word as a single unit, every unit of the writing system refers to a meaning? certainly not. Hangul is not a syllabary. a syllabary is a system in which one atomic symbol is one syllable. Hangul clearly does not work like this. One atomic symbol is one sound. And this alphabet is pretty well designed, on a linguistic point of view. the same phonetic opposition is always noted the same way: "b" have the same diference to "p" than "d" to "t" or "g" to "k"... This works also with vowels "a" "e" "o" regularly change to "ya" "ye" "yo"... what makes it look like a sillabry is that there are rules to know whether this vowel should be writen under or beside the initial consonant, and that you write the final consonant below the group formed by initial consonant and vowel... this create compact group for each syllable. Arguing that it is a syllabary because people used to it tend to read it syllable per syllable, and not letter by letter does not seem pertinent to me. english readers almost neer read a word letter by letter, but are so used to seing words than they recognise the whole word, without any need to separated each letter. english still uses an alphabet as do koreans. the computer point of view is just because it is more easy to store in a machine complete blocks of letters, than the rules saying whether this letter should be on the left or under this other one.

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Tim May <butsuri@...>