From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 19:38:02 CDT
> 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
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