Picking up an old thread that died out last week:
Peter Constable wrote:
> >> >Ethiopic and Canadian Syllabics and Tengwar are featural.
> >>
> >> I have never heard anyone suggest any script other than Hangul to be
> >> featural. Please explain.
> >
> >If you examine the UCAS, you'll see that the orientation of the
> >base consonant symbols (rotationally), and the placement of the
> >dots (or dashes), correlate with the vowellings of the syllables.
>
> Which it would seem means that this has properties of an abugida, I would
> have thought.
An abugida is basically a *consonant* writing system.
UCAS has a set of forms for open, vocalic syllables, like
the Hiragana a i u e o, as well as a complete set of CV
syllables (or actually several sets, since the entire system
has mutated as it has spread from language to language).
Conceptually the UCAS system is an enumeration of syllables.
What makes it featural is that you can find systematic correlations
in how the vowel ranks are indicated.
Also, I don't know of any true consonant writing system that
indicates vowels by rotations and inversions of the consonants.
> >Ethiopic, examined as a syllabary, has some of the same kinds
> >of characteristics as UCAS. The placement of the flags and
> >loops correlates with the vowel ranks,
>
> and for this reason I had heard Ethiopic described as an abugida. So what,
> then, is the difference between a featural syllabary and an abugida?
See above.
If the basic enumeration is a list of consonants, you are dealing
with an abugida.
If the basic enumeration is a list of syllables, you are dealing
with a syllabary -- and you then determine whether it is featural
or not by examining the graphemes for phonological correlations.
> >and the placement of the
> >top "butterflies" corresponds with manner or other distinctions among
> >the consonant ranks.
>
> Writing systems for Mayan languages often add an apostrophe after a
> consonant to indicate glottalised forms; writing systems of many languages
> use a tilde over vowels to indicate nasalistion; many W. African languages
> use grave and acute to indicate tone levels; etc. Does that make all of
> these writing systems featural?
The alphabets themselves are generally not, since they are just
extensions of Latin, where the letter shapes are arbitrarily
related to sounds.
However, if you do a graphological analysis of the orthographies
for these kinds of systems, and treat the various digraphs as
units of the overall system, then I'd say you can make
featural attributions for the grapheme formation. Thus, if I
have a system like: p t k ph th kh t' t' k' and so on, the
digraphs or use of modifier letters are clearly featural.
--Ken
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