Re: USAGE: Abugidas

John Cowan wrote at 2004-01-28 09:29:43 (-0500)
 > Andreas Johansson scripsit:
 >
 > > I've, BTW, always been somewhat mystified that someone ever came
 > > on the idea of having graphemic zero indicate /a/ (or /O/ and so
 > > on depending on language) rather than phonemic zero. In a
 > > language like Sanskrit it may perhaps save typing, but it's
 > > certainly the last idea I would have stumbled on. People are
 > > weird.
 >
 > Well, Tengwar (as used to spell Quenya, anyhow) is an abjad with
 > mandatory vowel marks, but the step from that to an abugida is
 > small, as JRRT himself indicates rather offhandedly in a footnote:
 >

John, didn't you tell me on 2003-03-03 that an abjad with mandatory
vowel marks was (in the opinion of Qalam) a contradiction in terms,
and therefore Tengwar as used to write Quenya is an alphabet?  Have you
altered your position on this point?

(I'm going off at a tangent here)

 > Canadian Syllabics is also an abugida, where the vowel signs are
 > rotations and the virama (that's the word someone was looking for
 > as a replacement for "vowel killer") is superscripting.
 >

Could one not as easily say that it's an alphabet in which the various
vowels are rotations plus _un_superscripting?  OK, realistically if we
have to assign it a place in the existing categories, abugida is
probably best.  But AFAICT it's only the fact that the /a/ series is
in the same orientation as the superscript consonants that gives us
ground to identify it as basic, i.e. to say that the inherent vowel is
/a/.

What I'm trying to say is that the process of applying a geometrical
transformation to a glyph is symmetrical in a way that adding a
diacritic isn't.  If you can't (in some hypothetical script) find a
good reason to choose between "rotate 90 $B!k (B clockwise = add /a/" and
"rotate 90 $B!k (B anticlockwise = virama", then I don't think you can
distinguish between an alphabet and an abugida.