Re: Abugidas (was: Chinese writing systems)

>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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