Zompist Bboard Again

Another innovation from that area is the use of matres lectionis in an abugida, not an abjad. The subscript letters for Indic /a/, /v/ and /y/ are used for representing vowels (Khmer and Tai languages) … The Bengali writing system has also developed a mater lectionis. I don’t find this particularly...

Now these two points are interesting… they remind me strongly of how consonant-doubling gets used with the Latin script (especially in Germanic). What vowel quality difference does consonant-doubling achieve in Thai? The consonant doubling made the vowel of the closed syllable into /a/. Without the...

Of course, these definitions are not the only possible ones. I know that many people consider the essential component of abugida-hood to be the writing of C+V in a single ‘syllable block’ (as I’ve been calling it). By this standard, scripts like Lao would be abugidas, while Meroitic and 'Phags-pa w...

Well, what I was thinking is that a consonantal grapheme would represent either a single consonant or a single syllable. But I’m leaning towards the ‘null grapheme’ analysis, for the same kinds of reasons you mentioned. I hadn’t heard of Pali Thai specifically, but I know that Hindi Devanagari does...

In the Thai writing system, subscripting stopped a long time ago, and now we even have a Thai parallel to alif otiosum. Hmm, what’s alif otiosum? Searching the term online turns up nothing helpful. Also known as 'guarding alif' or 'separating alif', which are translations of the Arabic names. When ...

But I dislike thinking of blocks as part of the definition: rather, I define ‘alphabets’ and ‘abugidas’ by which unit of language their graphemes represent. Whether they have syllable blocks or not is then an entirely orthogonal property. I commend Bright's term 'alphasyllabary' to you. I’ve alread...

Wikipedia, desperately in need of a comma: The Jena Band [of Choctaw Indians] was isolated until the 1950s on Whatley and Bowie lands, having limited contact with area whites because of Choctaw determination to maintain their community and discrimination. Move it on a generation, and you'd think th...

But I dislike thinking of blocks as part of the definition: rather, I define ‘alphabets’ and ‘abugidas’ by which unit of language their graphemes represent. Whether they have syllable blocks or not is then an entirely orthogonal property. I commend Bright's term 'alphasyllabary' to you. The first a...

And of course, all syllabaries have syllable blocks by definition! The property ‘having syllable blocks’ is independent of the property ‘is an abugida’ (i.e. ‘has an inherent vowel’), though there is admittedly a strong correlation. I don't agree that all syllabaries have syllable blocks. A pure CV...

This is indisputably an alphabet, and a very good one at that: the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is near-perfect. When you say "near-perfect", are you including how Hangul is read across syllables ? I would hardly call that "correspondence between graphemes and phonem...

Interesting question, though to answer it I think you'd need fairly deep knowledge of a language... dictionaries won't do. It wouldn't surprise me if "furry creatures" is a very old concept, but I don't know. "Beast" in (slightly older) English is often a rough equivalent. E.g. ...

I'm not sure why people came up with कि ki vs. की kī. All I can glean from WWS is that this doesn't go back to Brahmi. I wonder if one reason is that premodern people seem very reluctant to invent entirely new symbols, so a weird use of an existing one is preferred to creating a new one. Judging by...

Of course, the Hangul isn't being written as it was designed to be. It's overall direction used not to be left to right, but top to bottom. It's not certain that Lao ແ should be seen as two components, rather than one. Incidentally, except when used as the sole vowel component, ເ can be taken as a r...

I’ve just realised that we do in fact have another extant script similar to modern Lao: namely, Hangeul! Both are nonlinear yet write all consonants and vowels, though of course Hangeul takes the nonlinearity further than Lao does. Closer to home, we have the Latin script, e.g. in 17th century Engl...

I think if vowel marks are obligatory, to me that just sounds like another kind of abjad. Except it would be a weird abjad, because (a) abjads are defined by not writing the vowels obligatorily, and (b) the vowel marks in Lao are often written in line with the rest of the text, bipartitely in many ...

[*] Abugidas , in which consonantal graphemes can be used on their own or with a vocalic modifier to form syllabic blocks; and ... Next up: abjads and alphabets, most probably. (Unless I change my mind, of course.) You've fallen into the 'old men and women' ambiguity. Is a system which uses consona...

By contrast, English is most straightforwardly analysed as sequences of letters written in the same linear order as sounds: there is nothing about, say, the sequence ⟨li⟩ which justifies treating So do you regard Meroitic as an abugidaʔ I would say that it wasn't an alphasyllabary. I think Kirsty R...

[*] Abugidas , in which consonantal graphemes can be used on their own or with a vocalic modifier to form syllabic blocks; and ... Next up: abjads and alphabets, most probably. (Unless I change my mind, of course.) It is ambiguous! There’s good arguments either way. (At least for Lao; I can’t see h...

[*] Abugidas , in which consonantal graphemes can be used on their own or with a vocalic modifier to form syllabic blocks; and ... Next up: abjads and alphabets, most probably. (Unless I change my mind, of course.) You've fallen into the 'old men and women' ambiguity. Is a system which uses consona...

What do you think of this ? Does temperature have an influence on language sonority? This observation from the paper is pretty devastating: "The correlations fluctuating around zero indicate that the correlation between sonority and temperature is largely absent within language families."