>
>Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > Would you please enlighten me on the term "alphasyllabary"? Does it mean
>a
> > mixture of alphabetic and syllabic writing, or what?
>
>It's not a very perspicuous term, particularly because it blurs the
>fundamental difference between *abugidas* and *abjads*. We are concerned
>with the former here.
>
>In an abugida, the basic written forms are consonants. When the consonant
>appears in its basic form, it is understood to be followed by a vowel,
>called the *inherent vowel*. Exactly which vowel this is depends on the
>language, though it is often "short a". To indicate the use of a
>different vowel, a "vowel sign" is placed above, below, before, or after
>the consonant (sometimes in multiple parts in different places), which
>overrides the inherent vowel. A mark called a virama is used when there is
>no
>vowel at all. The Ethiopic script, uniquely, writes its vowel marks
>attached to the consonant.
>
>Vowels not preceded by a consonant are expressed by independent vowel
>letters. Sometimes these are derived from a "null consonant" with a
>vowel sign, but often by unique letterforms.
>
>One or more vowel-less consonants followed by an ordinary consonant
>are often written either as a ligature, or with the vowel-less consonants
>in a reduced ("half") form with no virama mark. Uniquely in Tibetan
>script,
>they are stacked below the main consonant, often many letters deep.
>
>Abugidas include the Ethiopic script on the one hand, and the many
>Indic and Indic-derived scripts (Myanmar, Thai, Lao, various Philippine
>scripts, various Indonesian scripts) on the other. All of them
>except the extinct Kharosthi script are written left-to-right.
>
>Because of the loss of consonant distinctions in Thai/Lao and their
>replacement by tones, these scripts divide their tones into tone groups;
>the particular consonant used encodes not only the (phonological)
>consonant, but also the tone group. A tone mark then selects the specific
>tone within the group.
>
>--
>Even a refrigerator can conform to the XML John Cowan
>Infoset, as long as it has a door sticker jcowan@reutershealth.com
>saying "No information items inside".
>
http://www.reutershealth.com
> --Eve Maler
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan