Re: Novus Scriptio [was: capitolisation]

Barbara Barrett scripsit:

> Each letter has an inherent vowel (which follows in the initial/medial and
> precedes for the final), but unlike Indian alphabets which also have
> inherent vowels, the vowel is always unread unless *activated* by a
> diacritic, whereby the letter becomes a syllabic - otherwise it only
> represented the phoneme in isolation (this solved the problem of Indian
> scripts of how to negate the inherent vowel for consonant clustering).
I don't follow this: if the inherent vowel is not pronounced unless a
diacritic is given, how can it be said to be inherent?  The essence of an
abugida (like Indic, Ethiopic, or Canadian Syllabics) is that the
inherent vowel is pronounced *unless* suppressed by a virama or overridden
by a vowel mark.  It sounds like you have an abjad with mandatory
vowel marks, like Tengwar.

Note that there has never been a writing system in which vowel marks
were attached to the consonants that followed them in order of speaking,
though some vowel marks (like Devanagari short i) have migrated to the
left of the consonant and thus *appear* to precede in written order
what they follow in spoken order.  The English and non-Beleriand Sindarin
modes of the Tengwar adopt this system, which makes the Tengwar very
difficult to encode in Unicode.

> The New system was Base 12, the angular numerals were based on Runes and
> Ogham (one corner for each unit; thus one had one corner, two two corners,
> three three corners, and so on). Cursive forms developed for writing numbers
> within texts (more visually elegant!) and these became used as syllabics
> within the system; This resulted in all languages using the same names for
> numbers.
That's hard to swallow, that so many and so diverse peoples could adopt
not only a new and unheard-of base for numbers, but to actually abandon
their number names entire, including such fundamentals as "one" (which is
also used as the indefinite article in languages that have one).

> The age of exploration, the discovery of the New World, and the opening of
> the Orient, naturally led to missionaries being sent to these new lands
> (although it was a brave Male missionary who'd risk Central and South
> America as Male Europeans had no immunity to the native illness known in the
> Old World as the Red Plague). It was many centuries later that it was
> discovered that the virus could not survive in blood with even the smallest
> trace of estrogen - an a remarkably similar compound occurred naturally in a
> mainstaple of the jungle diet - the Giant Yam.
If males didn't have estrogen in their bloodstreams they'd be dead.  Estrogens
are fundamental to mammalian life.

--
"But the next day there came no dawn,           John Cowan
and the Grey Company passed on into the         jcowan@reutershealth.com
darkness of the Storm of Mordor and were        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
lost to mortal sight; but the Dead              http://reutershealth.com
followed them.          --"The Passing of the Grey Company"

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