Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

Joe wrote at 2003-03-03 21:28:13 (+0000)
 > On Monday 03 March 2003 7:31 pm, Tim May wrote:
 > > Joe wrote at 2003-03-03 17:31:42 (+0000)
 > >
 > >  > 1. 'txt' is an abjad.  It only uses vowels when they seem
 > >  > neccesary.  'e' is especially often dropped, as in the name.
 > >
 > > Certainly abjads tend to drop vowels, but is that their defining
 > > characteristic?  My understanding is that it's the contrast
 > > between consonantal letters and vocalic diacritics that makes an
 > > abjad, and I don't see any reason why txt vowels would be
 > > considered diacritic.
 > >
 > > Mind you, I'm not sure that I have any absolutely reliable
 > > principle for discriminating between diacritics and letters.
 >
 > According to Omniglot:
 >
 >  Abjads, or consonant alphabets, represent consonants only, or
 > consonants plus some vowels. Full vowel indication (vocalisation)
 > can be added, usually by means of diacritics, but this is not
 > common. Most of abjads, with the exception of Divehi hakura and
 > Ugaritic, are written from right to left.
 >
 > http://www.omniglot.com/writing/alphabetic.htm
 >
 > It says 'usually' indicated by diacritics.  I think an ability to
 > drop vowels is the defining Characteristic.
 >

You may be right - the few definitions I've found seem compatible with
what you've said, although none satisfy me as a definitive statement.
I've thus far based my understanding on what John Cowan said in this
post:

http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0205D&L=conlang&D=0&P=35412

John Cowan wrote at 2002-05-25 01:08:21 (-0400)
[...]
 >
 > To a first approximation:
[...]
 > The letters of an abjad represents the consonants of the language.
 > The vowels may be represented by marks placed over, under, or
 > beside the preceding consonants, and are most often only used when
 > necessary (for religious texts, books written for children or
 > foreigners, or in strategic places to remove ambiguity).  It is
 > common to have a silent consonant onto which vowel marks can be
 > placed in order to represent vowels that don't follow any
 > consonant.
[...]

which seems to me to take the segregation of vowels into a seperate
class applied to the consonants as the defining factor; there are
later posts in the same thread (by various people) which appear to
rely on the assumption that "an abjad in which vowels are always made
explicit", while unusual, is not a contradiction in terms.

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