On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 21:49:57 +0100 Philippe Verdy via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> The concept of vowels as distinctive letters came later, even the > letter A was initially a representation of a glottal stop consonnant, > sometimes mute, only written to indicate a word that did not start by > a consonnant in their first syllable, letter. This has survived today > in abjads and abugidas where vowels became optional diacritics, but > that evolved as plain diacritics in Indic abugidas. OK. > The situation is even more complex because clusters of consonnants > were also represented in early vowel-less alphabets to represent full > syllables (this has formed the base of todays syllabaries when only > some glyph variants of the base consonnant was introduced to > distinguish their vocalization; The only syllabary where what you say might be true is the Ethiopic syllabary, and I have grave doubts as to that case. I hope you are aware that most syllabaries do not derive from alphabets, abjads or abugidas. > Indic abugidas with their complex > clusters where vowel diacritic create contextual variant forms of the > base consonnant is also a remnant of this old age): I see no reasons to regard consonant-vowel ligatures as going back to an earlier system without dependent vowels. > the separation of > phonetic consonnants came only later. Old Brahmi stacked consonants are generally very clear compositions. Opaque ligatures are a later development. Writing consonants linearly is a later development; is this what you are referring to? Richard.