Re: Novus Scriptio [was: capitolisation]

Sorry, I forgot to delete the part of the message I didn't respond to.

From: "John Cowan"

> 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.
IIRC vowel marks are mandatory in Persian which is written with the Arabic
alphabet.