> Peter Constable wrote: > >I was already after the first paragraph going to mention another writing > >system, and I'm even more strongly reminded of it by this second > >paragraph: Sign Writing...
> And there's also Visible Speech, by Alexander Melville Bell (and > improved by Henry Sweet), which is definitely an alphabet (a phonetic > one), but also very decidedly featural: different shapes represent > different articulators or features. > > And tengwar is featural Back up the truck a moment. I was not saying because Sign Writing is like Hangul that we should therefore categorize it as featural. In case I wasn't clear, I don't mind featural as an adjunct characteristic, but I do not think that belongs in our basic taxonomy of scripts, which is structurally based. Not unless there's a writing system in which the units of written representation correspond to phonological features. And neither Sign Writing nor Hangul is like that. > at least in some modes (doubled bow=voicing, > raised stem=fricative, etc). And Herman Miller has a phonetic alphabet > called Lhoerr (I think) which is also based on having each piece of a > symbol represent some feature of the phone(me). Interesting; if there is consistent variation, then this would be like an abugida, except that the consistent variations in shape correspond to features rather than phonemes, with the whole representing a phoneme rather than a syllable. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
