I fully agree. "Featural" is a description orthogonal to considerations like "alphabet" or "syllabary" or "printed in green ink" for that matter. I was just running off with talking about other orthographies which could be described as featural, whatever else the are (note that VS and Lhoerr are alphabets, and tengwar is probably closest to an abjad, in most modes)Peter Constable wrote:
writingI was already after the first paragraph going to mention another
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.
~mark
