suzmccarth wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Muke Tever" <muke@f...> wrote:
> > Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@s...> wrote:
>  I'm far from qualified to comment on its accuracy and
> > > quality.
> > >
> > > <http://www.answers.com/topic/canadian-aboriginal-syllabics>
> >
> > It's just a Wikipedia mirror.  The original page is:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_Syllabics
>
> It pretty much reflects what I know. Quite detailed. Under 'current
> usgae' there is an description of what I am refering to.
>
> "In the past, government policy towards syllabics has varied from
> indifference to open hostility. Until quite recently, government
> policy in Canada openly undermined native languages and church
> organisations were often the only organised bodies using syllabics.
> Later, as governments became more accommodating of native languages
> and in some cases even encouraged their use, it was widely believed
> that moving to a Roman alphabet writing scheme was better both for
> linguistic reasons and to reduce the cost of supporting alternative
> writing schemes."
>
> There were 'linguistic reasons' for prefering an alphabet. An
> alphabet was thought to be more phonemic?  After all there was lots
> of tech support for syllabics throughout its history.

"More phonemic" makes no sense. If every consonant phoneme had a row,
and every vowel phoneme had a column (or a column plus a diacritic),
there was no "additional" phonemicness to be had.

(If tone was to be notated, diacritics would need to be added whether
syllabics or alphabet.)

> Maybe it was because Bloomfield thought of writing as subordinate to
> or a reflection of speech, not an independent system of its won.

Then wouldn't this attitude lead a newly devised writing system to be as
faithful a representation of speech as possible, i.e. (for that era)
perfectly phonemic? That's certainly the goal of missionary linguists
devising what Smalley called "practical orthographies."

> For Bloomfield writing was 'merely a way of recording language by
> means of visible marks' .  I am sure that in the first half of this
> century linguists believed that a phonemic orthography, and by that
> they usually meant alphabetic, was best.

Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
"non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

suzmccarth wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
> wrote:
>
> > Can you tell me anything about the Henry Smith Williams *History of the
> > Art of Writing* you mentioned last week? I've discovered that it's four
> > boxes of plates, either 50 per box, or "203 [i.e. 228] plates," which I
> > am stumped by; and that I actually have a work by Mr. Smith Williams --
> > the Wonder Book of the World's Knowledge (1935), ten little volumes of
> > gee whiz! factoids that would amuse the kiddies. (They certainly amused
> > this kiddie, 40 years ago.)
> >
> > There's a copy available for purchase for considerably less than any
> > other available copy, which is "missing plates 155 and 157." Since
> > they're from the "Oriental" set, I imagine they'd be important to me.
>
> Unfortuanately I don't know any more than that he refers to it when
> he writes in this book which is now an e-book, available on the
> internet in its entirety. He certainly had a way with words.

I thought you said you'd consulted it in that basement room of yours.

> A History of Science Volume I
> by Henry Smith Williams
> Part V
> The Alphabet Achieved
>
> http://www.worldwideschool.org/library
>
> Go to this webpage and look up Henry Smith Williams by Author under
> W.
>
> "We cannot believe that any nation could have vaulted to the final
> stage of the simple alphabetical writing without tracing the devious
> and difficult way of the pictograph and the syllabary. It is
> possible, however, for a cultivated nation to build upon the
> shoulders of its neighbors, and, profiting by the experience of
> others, to make sudden leaps upward and onward. And this is
> seemingly what happened in the final development of the art of
> writing. For while the Babylonians and Assyrians rested content with
> their elaborate syllabary, a nation on either side of them,
> geographically speaking, solved the problem, which they perhaps did
> not even recognize as a problem; wrested from their syllabary its
> secret of consonants and vowels, and by adopting an arbitrary sign
> for each consonantal sound, produced that most wonderful of human
> inventions, the alphabet. .....
>
> It made possible for the first time that education of the masses
> upon which all later progress of civilization was so largely to
> depend."

It's clear that he didn't understand how cuneiform works.

I'll be seeing the portfolios today.

> But in 1981 M.A. Powell (Visible Speech 15) said
>
> "the inescapable conclusion is that the introduction of the
> alphabet, by itself, has had little effect on the reduction of
> functional illiteracy, and thus its importance in the history of
> human development has been overestimated, whereas that of cuneiform
> has probably been underestimated."
>
> So I think of 1880's, Taylor, to 1980's as the century of the
> alphabet.
>
> What do you know about Powell?

He's a _really_ nice guy who seems to have felt very isolated out there
in DeKalb -- after ca. 1980, he stopped coming to events in Chicago, to
the Midwest or national AOS meetings, etc.
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

suzmccarth wrote:

> BTW you mentioned that Central Algonkian has consonant clusters but
> I am not sure what you are refering to.

You mean, you don't know the term "consonant cluster"?

If you mean you know Central Algonquian languages (Fox, Cree, Menominee,
Ojibway, Potawotami) and you don't think they have clusters, I'll get
you some from Bloomfield's reconstruction of PCA.
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

Richard Wordingham wrote:

> And as I remarked earlier, the page on Potawatomi at
> http://www.rosettaproject.org/live gives examples of CVC spellings for
> monosyllables.  However, there's plenty of precedent for phonetically
> CVC syllables being written as unambiguous CV, e.g. Linear B and
> Buginese IIRC.

Define unambiguous! And see any source on Linear B and/vs. Cypriote
orthography (Woodard is good on that), or WWW p. 482 on the 16 different
possible readings of <ba> in Hanunoo, given the 15 possible final
consonants and none.
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

suzmccarth wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
> wrote:
> > suzmccarth wrote:
> > >
> > > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
> > > >wrote:
> >
> > > > How did Taylor, <snip> "suppress" literacy? Isaac Taylor was
> > > > a Durham (IIRC) cathedral canon and antiquarian.
> > >
> > > No, Suppress use of syllabics. If you believe that the alphabet is
> > > the most advanced then a syllabary must be less advanced.
> >
> > Does he believe the alphabet is the most advanced?
>
> Do you know that he does _not_ say anything to indicate this? I
> would be interested.

I find nothing in the Epilogue (on evolution) to suggest that he thought
in such terms at all.

> > noted that Taylor calls the Indian scripts "alphabets" (not
> > "syllabaries" -- but he was _barely_ aware of how vowels were notated
> > and may not have realized even that some vowel symbols appear to the
> > left of, i.e. before, the consonant symbols for the consonants that the
> > vowels follow).
>
> I don't have access to a copy of Isaac Taylor. Are you sure that he
> was not aware of the position of the vowel notation?  I looked at

"In both alphabets [i.e. what we call Brahmi and Kharosthi] the
fundamental vowel â, which in Indian languages constitutes thirty-five
per cent. of all the vowels, is not expressed at all, except at the
beginning of words, being regarded as inherent in the preceding
consonant. In both alphabets the other medial vowels are expressed by a
short stroke (-) attached to the covering consonant, and varying in
position according to the nature of the vowel to be denoted." (2:303
n.1)

There is nothing at all else on the writing of vowels although he has 60
more pages on Indian and Farther Indian alphabets.

> P.Berger, 1891, again and found that he includes a very clear
> description of the "inherent a", and he accurately describes the
> position of each vowel notation,as well as the consonant conjuncts,
> for Devanagari.  He references Isaac Taylor frequently but does not
> mention that he is adding to or contradicting anything T. says.

Why should he? You seem to want every scientific article to be
confrontational and argumentative.

I don't know what P. Berger 1891 may be; Taylor wrote in 1883. The 1899
edition includes a few pages of addenda.

> Berger classes Indic scripts as alphabets but I do see a precursor
> of Fevrier and Cohen's neosyllabary in his writing.
>
> I am back again to wondering what you meant when you said
>
> "But these terms misleadingly suggest that the abugida is a subtype
> or hybrid of alphabet or syllabary, a notion that has lead to
> unfortunate historical/evolutionary notions about the history of
> writing." WWS p.4
>
> I have been reading writing system theory from a different
> perspective and I am not at all sure what you intend here.
> Particularly 'misleadingly' 'unfortunate' and 'evolutionary'.

They have the morpheme "syllab" in them.

> > I'll see the History of Writing tomorrow
>
> I hope you got to see it - I'll have to wait a while, the reference
> library at UBC closes at 5:00 during spring hours.

Don't bother!
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > > Can you tell me anything about the Henry Smith Williams *History of the
> > > Art of Writing*
> >
> > Another book of Williams is on the interent in its entirety and
> > mentions his view of the alphabet. I'll find it later.
>
> His History of Science (4v.) is available on Gutenberg -- the zip files
> are only ~150 Kb each, so I downloaded them and found the place (v. 1,
> chap. 4). He was not too badly informed, but he doesn't have anything
> particularly interesting to say; doesn't, of course, mention India at
> all.
>
> I'll see the History of Writing tomorrow -- the NYPL's Jewish Division
> has a copy, and there are _two_ librarians who know exactly where in the
> collection it's shelved (even though the main collection's copy is "off
> site," which means somewhere around Princeton, NJ, and there's no
> guarantee they'd be able to find it, so the supposition that it's
> available "in a day or two" is optimistic). But given what he said in
> the HoS just a few years later, I'm not expecting too much. I do hope,
> though, that the presentation will be Haut Art Nouveau.

It turns out to be a huge disappointment. Unlike Clodd's book published
in the same year, and Mason's 1920 book with the same title, it is not a
history of the art of writing. It is nothing but more than 200
photographs of documents (including a few cuneiform tablets in the BM,
and the Rosetta Stone, with the Orient represented by a Batak ms., a
Pali ms. [the plate was missing], a Tibetan page, and a very handsome
Burmese page). There is not one script chart, not one word about how the
scripts represent the texts that are translated.

And it isn't even attractive to the eye.

Fortunately, the other two things I went to the library for were there
and as expected.
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...> wrote:
> Richard Wordingham wrote:

> > However, there's plenty of precedent for phonetically
> > CVC syllables being written as unambiguous CV, e.g. Linear B and
> > Buginese IIRC.
>
> Define unambiguous!

Internal disconnect!  As I'm sure you realised, I meant to
write 'ambiguous'.

Richard.

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:

> (If tone was to be notated, diacritics would need to be added
whether
> syllabics or alphabet.)

Not necessarily.  Nushu appears to be a phonetic syllabary, but I
have not heard that it uses diacritics for the tone distinctions.

There ought to be a language in which the tone contrast is solely
marked in the initial consonant - tonal Mon-Khmer languages would be
an obvious place to look.  (Tone is generally a recent development in
Mon-Khmer languages, and can carry the now generally lost distinction
between voiced and voiceless initials, e.g. some dialects of Khmu.)
Most Tai scripts use a combination of consonant and diacritic for the
tone.

Do the initial consonants mark a 3-way tone distinction in any Tai
language or dialect?  <hñ> v. <y> v. <ñ> would be possible for a Lao
dialect that had, like Siamese, undergone the 3-way merger of /j/, /?
j/ and /ñ/.  The Thai digraph <'y> (or <?y> if you prefer) no longer
occurs in the right environments to justify citing the U Thong
dialect or a Southern Thai dialect, and I don't there there is a 3-
way contrast (*not* supplemented by a tone mark) in the area where
the Lanna Thai script may legitimately be used.

Richard.

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...> wrote:

> Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
> "non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.

Some of the Roman alphabet-based 'syllabaries', e.g. that of
Potawatomi, deliberately drop the phonation contrast!  Or are you
denying these systems the status of 'orthographies'?

Philippine orthographies relegate glottal stops to the pronunciations
shown in dictionaries.  Malay <e> (two distinct vowels) and final <k>
also spring to mind, though <k> may be an example of a language having
two co-existing spelling systems - native and loanword.

As to the Royal Thai General System of Transcription,...

Richard.

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> suzmccarth wrote:
> >
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> >
> > >it was Taylor who
> > > first, AFAICT, introduced the tripartite classification
(1883/1899).
> >
> > I actually saw a copy of Taylor for sale on the internet but when
I
> > enquired they said they couldn't find it. Too bad. It isn't in our
>
> Do you remember the price? I make do with a photocopy of Columbia's
1899
> ed.

It was $125.00 USD and not in perfect condition but it was the 1883
edition.  However, it is gone.

I notice that Robarts library in Toronto has an 1883 edition. This is
the catalogue entry.

The alphabet : an account of the origin and development of letters
     Taylor, Isaac, 1829-1901

K. Paul, Trench 1883

Suzanne

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@n...> wrote:
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
>
> > Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
> > "non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.
>
> Some of the Roman alphabet-based 'syllabaries', e.g. that of
> Potawatomi, deliberately drop the phonation contrast!  Or are you
> denying these systems the status of 'orthographies'?
>
> Philippine orthographies relegate glottal stops to the
pronunciations
> shown in dictionaries.  Malay <e> (two distinct vowels) and final
<k>
> also spring to mind, though <k> may be an example of a language
having
> two co-existing spelling systems - native and loanword.
>
> As to the Royal Thai General System of Transcription,...

This argument about non-phonemicity was given to me in conversation
with a linguist working with Cree who had hoped to introduce
alphabetic literacy in a certain area but was reluctantly in the
process of transfering to syllabics.

Since the Cree had been writing without using diacritics (how am I
supposed to say this, overdot and preaspiration, not diacritic as in
vowel markers) there was a certain amount of underrepresentation.
Also sometimes finals were left off as well. All these symbols were
of a reduced size, had a different status in the system for native
speakers, and the overall shape of the word was left unchanged -
without these symbols, it was called unpointed text.

But when writing in an alphabet, the English linguists used the
double vowel system for long vowels and h for preaspiration. Now the
long vowel and the h have a symbol _of the same status_ as other
symbols and are not as likely to be left out.  So, somehow it was
felt that the syllabic system contributed to a habit of
underrepresentation. This was especially so if a writer wrote only
one symbol for each syllable and did not write the final. Also a
reduced vowel might have disappeared altogether in a dialect but the
writer might use a full syllabic symbol for what was perceived by
the linguist to be a consonant(no vowel).

In a language with multisyllabic morphemes there were relatively few
homographs.  However, some homogtraphs were found and that was
enough to prove that underrepresentation should not be allowed.

While Kenneth Pike's Phonemics was a strong influence, he later
suggested an 'ethnophonemic' principle, and even underrepresentation
was eventually considered as allowable if non-scientific, a real
compromise. The morphophonemic principle had its own ups and downs.

I am sure someone somewhere commented that syllabaries tend to have
a certain amount of underrepresentation in them (as though alphabets
don't)  This is not my argument - just a comment on a view that I
have heard expressed from time to time.

Two questions really

1. Do syllabaries, in fact, tend towards greater underrepresentation
than alphabetic orthographies?

2. To what extent is underrepresentaiton detrimental to literacy?
How much can be tolerated without undermining literacy?

Suzanne

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> suzmccarth wrote:
>
> > BTW you mentioned that Central Algonkian has consonant clusters but
> > I am not sure what you are refering to.
>
> You mean, you don't know the term "consonant cluster"?
>
> If you mean you know Central Algonquian languages (Fox, Cree,
Menominee,
> Ojibway, Potawotami) and you don't think they have clusters, I'll get
> you some from Bloomfield's reconstruction of PCA.

But would consonant clusters in PCA be relevant to an orthography
developed for a CA langauge in the 19th century? An example would be
great.

Suzanne

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> suzmccarth wrote:

>
> "In both alphabets [i.e. what we call Brahmi and Kharosthi] the
> fundamental vowel â, which in Indian languages constitutes thirty-
five
> per cent. of all the vowels, is not expressed at all, except at the
> beginning of words, being regarded as inherent in the preceding
> consonant. In both alphabets the other medial vowels are expressed
by a
> short stroke (-) attached to the covering consonant, and varying in
> position according to the nature of the vowel to be denoted."
(2:303
> n.1)
>
> There is nothing at all else on the writing of vowels although he
has 60
> more pages on Indian and Farther Indian alphabets.

Thanks for the Isaac Taylor stuff.  I had expected more.

Here is Philippe Berger.

Philippe Berger  1891
Title: Histoire de l'écriture dans l'antiquité.
Main Author: Berger, Philippe, 1846-1912.
Published: Paris : Imprimerie nationale, 1891.

"The Sanskrit alphabet does not present itself in a very simple
manner in the practice of writing. The process by which we have
found the principle in Indo-Bacterian, and which consisted of
suspending the letters one from another in order to express complex
sounds, develops in Devanagari. Not only is the short a not written
either in the middle or the end of words, since it is inherent in
the consonant, but the other vowels are replaced, within the words,
by signs which differ from the full form.

The short i becomes … and precedes the consonant in writing,
although it follows it in pronunciation.  The four medial vowels …
aa, … ii, … oo and … au place themselves after the consonant, six
others attach themselves to the bottom of the consonant: … u, …. ou,
… ri, … rii, … lri, … lrii, two, … ee and … aa are placed above.
Finally, the consonants attach themselves to each other in such a
way as to form groups, the number of which rises to more than 800."

I have substituted Berger's writing of the vowels with a double
vowel system to indicate long vowels. Berger used the macron, breve,
acute, circumflex and umlaut to mark vowel quality.  Each Devnagari
vowel notation was also represented following the transliteration.
He supplied the Devanagari vowel where I have put ... (Of course, I
won't attempt to put Devnagari in here because I am afraid it will
come out as Chinese!)

  > > I am back again to wondering what you meant when you said
> >
> > "But these terms misleadingly suggest that the abugida is a
subtype
> > or hybrid of alphabet or syllabary, a notion that has lead to
> > unfortunate historical/evolutionary notions about the history of
> > writing." WWS p.4
> >
> > I have been reading writing system theory from a different
> > perspective and I am not at all sure what you intend here.
> > Particularly 'misleadingly' 'unfortunate' and 'evolutionary'.
>
> They have the morpheme "syllab" in them.

Why were the evolutionary notions so unfortunate? I know why _I_
find them unfortunate but you seem to have other reasons.

> > > I'll see the History of Writing tomorrow
> >
> > I hope you got to see it - I'll have to wait a while, the
reference
> > library at UBC closes at 5:00 during spring hours.
>
> Don't bother!

I only mentioned Smith Williams as an example of the powerful
connection between the alphabet and mass literacy. In fact, the
breaking of this association is so recent that it has lead Robert
Logan to revise his book "The Alphabet Effect", 1987, and write a
second edition in 2003 to include phonetic syllabaries in with
alphabets. (Now I ask you please not to jump on me for reading such
a book. I do have to keep in touch with the shenanigans of the
Toronto School once in a while.)

Suzanne

Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...> wrote:
>
> > Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
> > "non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.
>
> Some of the Roman alphabet-based 'syllabaries', e.g. that of
> Potawatomi, deliberately drop the phonation contrast!  Or are you
> denying these systems the status of 'orthographies'?

Believe it or not, there are languages in which voice is not phonemic.

Is this one of them?

> Philippine orthographies relegate glottal stops to the pronunciations
> shown in dictionaries.  Malay <e> (two distinct vowels) and final <k>
> also spring to mind, though <k> may be an example of a language having
> two co-existing spelling systems - native and loanword.
>
> As to the Royal Thai General System of Transcription,...

I don't, of course, know what you're talking about, but if you're
suggesting that /'/ is a phoneme unrepresented in the orthography, is it
predictable from the phonotactics?
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

{Lowest priority}

On Tue, 03 May 2005 22:41:50 -0400, Nicholas Bodley
<nbodley@...> wrote:
[...]
> One, concerned with old Cyrillic retters, deleted a number of them
[...]

Ah, the joys of the Dvorak layout. R and L are right next to each other,
significantly increasing the likelihood of inadvertent, seeming spoofs of
the difficulties some people from Asia have with English.

Regards,

--
nb
who is trying to proofread more of what's sent

Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
> wrote:
>
> > (If tone was to be notated, diacritics would need to be added
> whether
> > syllabics or alphabet.)
>
> Not necessarily.  Nushu appears to be a phonetic syllabary, but I
> have not heard that it uses diacritics for the tone distinctions.

What is Nushu? Is that a Chinese name for Yi?

Why would being a "phonetic syllabary" lead you to expect tone
distinctions to be written?

If it is Yi, that's a syllabary including tone that's only a few decades
old, hence a sophisticated grammatogeny, hence not interesting. Its 819
characters are cut down and regularized from thousands of logosyllabic
characters.

> There ought to be a language in which the tone contrast is solely
> marked in the initial consonant - tonal Mon-Khmer languages would be
> an obvious place to look.  (Tone is generally a recent development in
> Mon-Khmer languages, and can carry the now generally lost distinction
> between voiced and voiceless initials, e.g. some dialects of Khmu.)
> Most Tai scripts use a combination of consonant and diacritic for the
> tone.

Why "ought" there to be? How many local languages have inherited writing
systems?

Smalley urged people to create Thai-based, not roman-based, scripts for
Tai languages, so his last book is an obvious place to look.

> Do the initial consonants mark a 3-way tone distinction in any Tai
> language or dialect?  <hñ> v. <y> v. <ñ> would be possible for a Lao
> dialect that had, like Siamese, undergone the 3-way merger of /j/, /?
> j/ and /ñ/.  The Thai digraph <'y> (or <?y> if you prefer) no longer
> occurs in the right environments to justify citing the U Thong
> dialect or a Southern Thai dialect, and I don't there there is a 3-
> way contrast (*not* supplemented by a tone mark) in the area where
> the Lanna Thai script may legitimately be used.
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

suzmccarth wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...> wrote:
> > suzmccarth wrote:
> >
> > > BTW you mentioned that Central Algonkian has consonant clusters but
> > > I am not sure what you are refering to.
> >
> > You mean, you don't know the term "consonant cluster"?
> >
> > If you mean you know Central Algonquian languages (Fox, Cree, Menominee,
> > Ojibway, Potawotami) and you don't think they have clusters, I'll get
> > you some from Bloomfield's reconstruction of PCA.
>
> But would consonant clusters in PCA be relevant to an orthography
> developed for a CA langauge in the 19th century? An example would be
> great.

No, Suzanne. An article on the reconstruction of a proto-language
contains data from all the daughter languages. (Except in this case
Pot., since Bloomfield didn't have data on it until Hockett's
fieldwork.)
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

Did this turn into a moderated group recently, with the moderator taking
two days to post messages??
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> >
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> >
> > > Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
> > > "non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.
> >
> > Some of the Roman alphabet-based 'syllabaries', e.g. that of
> > Potawatomi, deliberately drop the phonation contrast!

> Believe it or not, there are languages in which voice is not
phonemic.
>
> Is this one of them?

It has contrastive aspiration, which is why I used the
word 'phonation'.  The original spelling system indicated a voicing
contrast, but it was probably using near-English values, as in the
way pinyin shows the aspiration of stops.  (I don't know enough to
exclude the possbility of /b/ > /ph/ in historic times.)

> > Philippine orthographies relegate glottal stops to the
pronunciations
> > shown in dictionaries.

No.  Typical unpredictable places are word-finally and in
intervocalic clusters, which are spelt the same as single
intervocalic consonants.  It may be predictable at the start of a
word - I don't remember the details of that.

Richard.

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> Did this turn into a moderated group recently, with the moderator
> taking two days to post messages??

Yes, Qalam changed into a moderated group, but this did not happen
recently: I probably did this around 2001, after the first few spam
messages hit the list.

So far, this has been almost unnoticeable to most people, because all
frequent posters (or, indeed, all posters who did not look like
spammers) have been in the "white list", i.e. were allowed to post
without moderation.

Only people who never posted before (the so-called "lurkers") are
normally in moderated status but, as soon as they posted their first
few in-topic messages, they pass in the white list (or, if they posted
things like "Buy viagra and get a free mortgage", they get silently
expelled and banned).

Recently, however, I have seen an outburst of OT messages, pointless
flames, ad personam attacks... And this is not the kind of discussions
that I, and probably everybody else, would like to read on Qalam!

I thought that the time to play the tyrant finally came, so I turned
*most* Qalamites who had been active in the last few weeks into
moderated mode, in an attempt to prevent more OT and flames, and to
have an opportunity to tell people "Hey, stop that!".

Ironically, as soon as I was psychologically ready to impersonate the
intolerant censor, all the OT's and flames suddenly stopped, so I had
to waste my time approving a lot of perfectly in-topic and polite
messages...

I guess this means that everybody realized by themselves that it was
time to adopt a more affable behavior. So I guess that a tyrant was
not needed, after all, and the only thing left to do now is to put
people back in the white list, as this is much more convenient for
everybody.

In the future, please everybody keep into reasonable off-topic quota,
and avoid engaging in polemical arguments.

Alternatively, pelase transgress for a time long enough to allow me to
have a try at my ACME dictator's toolkit! :-)

Regards.
Seshat (Qalam admin)

Hi!

"Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> writes:
> [...]
> > One, concerned with old Cyrillic retters, deleted a number of them
> [...]
>
> Ah, the joys of the Dvorak layout. R and L are right next to each other,
> significantly increasing the likelihood of inadvertent, seeming spoofs of
> the difficulties some people from Asia have with English.

Funny -- when I got my Dvorak keyboard, one of the first things to do
was to swap 'L' and ';' since I felt 'L' was too far away for my
fingers to reach it easily.  So I never encountered those types^H^Hos.
But the last word in the previous sentence is a good example for typos
that happen due to all vowels being next to each other...

I also tend to type 'nat' instead of 'not' (which I especially dislike
because it looks like I'm trying to stress unrounded pronunciation of
the vowel).

Anyway, it's good to switch to a *completely* different layout, since
the brain is virgin wrt. to the new layout and you can optimise the
layout for your special typing habbits without pain.  I mean, without
*additional* pain -- it really was a bit of a pain to finally reach
fluency with the new layout again.  But now the keys are perfectly
suited for typing English, German, C, C++, Perl, Latex, Shell and
Lisp. :-)

I have most symbols on AltGr + letter, so they are easily reachable
without stretching fingers.  A funny thing is that $%#@ are right next
to each other on AltGr + MWVZ -- so this looks like the Perl 'vowels'
row...

**Henrik

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> >
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > (If tone was to be notated, diacritics would need to be added
> > whether
> > > syllabics or alphabet.)
> >
> > Not necessarily.  Nushu appears to be a phonetic syllabary, but I
> > have not heard that it uses diacritics for the tone distinctions.
>
> What is Nushu? Is that a Chinese name for Yi?

No!  See http://www2.ttcn.ne.jp/~orie/home.htm .

> Why would being a "phonetic syllabary" lead you to expect tone
> distinctions to be written?

Because tone is an important part of the sound, more important than
vowel length.

> > There ought to be a language in which the tone contrast is solely
> > marked in the initial consonant - tonal Mon-Khmer languages would
be
> > an obvious place to look.

> Why "ought" there to be? How many local languages have inherited
writing
> systems?

It seems that most of Tai languages outside China do or did.
(Thailand may be exceptional, in that the Siamese system was
established throughout the country, and local systems lost their
utility.)  There may, of course, have been massive re-adjustments, as
for example happened in Britain.

> Smalley urged people to create Thai-based, not roman-based, scripts
for
> Tai languages, so his last book is an obvious place to look.

I think you mean for Thai languages, though using Thai for other Tai
languages might be an effective way of escaping 'phonetic' order.  (I
think phonetic order is actually impossible for Thai - if a 'logical
order' in the Unicode sense existed, it would be neither visual nor
phonetic!)

A Thai-based writing system would not be such a system - tone
contrasts on syllables starting with unvoiced, unaspirated stops
would be shown by tone marks.

Richard.

Seshat wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > Did this turn into a moderated group recently, with the moderator
> > taking two days to post messages??
>
> Yes, Qalam changed into a moderated group, but this did not happen
> recently: I probably did this around 2001, after the first few spam
> messages hit the list.
>
> So far, this has been almost unnoticeable to most people, because all
> frequent posters (or, indeed, all posters who did not look like
> spammers) have been in the "white list", i.e. were allowed to post
> without moderation.

Yet it is now taking three to four days for messages to appear.

Holding a conversation (as opposed to exchanging letters through the
mail!) at such a pace is impossible and intolerable.
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> suzmccarth wrote:
> >
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
wrote:
> > > suzmccarth wrote:
> > >
> > > > BTW you mentioned that Central Algonkian has consonant
clusters but
> > > > I am not sure what you are refering to.
> > >
> > > You mean, you don't know the term "consonant cluster"?
> > >
> > > If you mean you know Central Algonquian languages (Fox, Cree,
Menominee,
> > > Ojibway, Potawotami) and you don't think they have clusters,
I'll get
> > > you some from Bloomfield's reconstruction of PCA.
> >
> > But would consonant clusters in PCA be relevant to an orthography
> > developed for a CA langauge in the 19th century? An example would
be
> > great.
>
> No, Suzanne. An article on the reconstruction of a proto-language
> contains data from all the daughter languages.

Yes, but you don't actually say whether the consonant clusters are in
CA or in PCA.  You mentioned consonant clusters in CA some time last
summer and I am still waiting for an example.  It is hard to carry on
a conversation at this pace.

Suzanne

(Except in this case
> Pot., since Bloomfield didn't have data on it until Hockett's
> fieldwork.)
> --
> Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@a...

suzmccarth wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...> wrote:
> > suzmccarth wrote:
> > >
> > > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...> wrote:
> > > > suzmccarth wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > BTW you mentioned that Central Algonkian has consonant clusters but
> > > > > I am not sure what you are refering to.
> > > >
> > > > You mean, you don't know the term "consonant cluster"?
> > > >
> > > > If you mean you know Central Algonquian languages (Fox, Cree, Menominee,
> > > > Ojibway, Potawotami) and you don't think they have clusters, I'll get
> > > > you some from Bloomfield's reconstruction of PCA.
> > >
> > > But would consonant clusters in PCA be relevant to an orthography
> > > developed for a CA langauge in the 19th century? An example would be
> > > great.
> >
> > No, Suzanne. An article on the reconstruction of a proto-language
> > contains data from all the daughter languages.
>
> Yes, but you don't actually say whether the consonant clusters are in
> CA or in PCA.  You mentioned consonant clusters in CA some time last
> summer and I am still waiting for an example.  It is hard to carry on
> a conversation at this pace.

Why would I have mentioned consonant clusters in Central Algonquian some
time last summer? Did you ever ask for an example? Anyway you know Cree,
and since CVC syllables exist, and the language is highly synthetic,
there must be plenty of CVCCVCCVCCVC-style words.

I have been inquiring about the "pace" for two weeks now, but apparently
the moderator felt that inquiries about the pace were off topic.

> (Except in this case
> > Pot., since Bloomfield didn't have data on it until Hockett's
> > fieldwork.)
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@y...> wrote:
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
> wrote:
> > suzmccarth wrote:

> Yes, but you don't actually say whether the consonant clusters are in
> CA or in PCA.  You mentioned consonant clusters in CA some time last
> summer and I am still waiting for an example.  It is hard to carry on
> a conversation at this pace.

Here's an apparent specimen of Potawatomi from
<http://www.network54.com/Forum/message?forumid=8243&messageid=1112639459>:

  wegwnije ga zhechgeyek ode msenegen.wawika shna ngi bya shode ewi
wawijgeyan enebyegeyek. neyap nwi byayan shode mine ngodek shna. bama
pi mine.

This is from the forum associated with http://www.potawatomilang.org .
  There are other words scattered about the site which appear to
contain clusters.

Richard.

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@n...> wrote:
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@y...> wrote:
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@w...>
> > wrote:
> > > suzmccarth wrote:
>
> > Yes, but you don't actually say whether the consonant clusters
are in
> > CA or in PCA.  You mentioned consonant clusters in CA some time
last
> > summer and I am still waiting for an example.  It is hard to
carry on
> > a conversation at this pace.
>
> Here's an apparent specimen of Potawatomi from
> <http://www.network54.com/Forum/message?
forumid=8243&messageid=1112639459>:
>
>  wegwnije ga zhechgeyek ode msenegen.wawika shna ngi bya shode ewi
> wawijgeyan enebyegeyek. neyap nwi byayan shode mine ngodek shna.
bama
> pi mine.
>
> This is from the forum associated with
http://www.potawatomilang.org .
>  There are other words scattered about the site which appear to
> contain clusters.

Thanks for the example of Potawatomi. I knew about ng but not ms or
shn as a consonant cluster. There is no contrastive voicing or
phonation in Cree but there is the preaspirate. While the preaspirate
always had a symbol it was seldom used.


Wâskahikaniwiyiniwâcimowina: Stories of the House People

kôhkominawak otâcimowiniwâwa

ê-itatoskêyân mêkwâc, nikî-wâh-wâpahtên mâna pêyak wâskahikan ê-pâh-
pihkitêk. ninohtê-kiskêyihtên ôma awîna ...

Here are a few Cree phrases.  The labialization is an added sidedot
and the s final can be used at the end of a syllable. However, Cree
has been written without marking the s final. No word would ever
begin with a CCV syllable. itatoskeyan would have this structure V-CV-
CV-C-CV-CV-C I guess there are some phonological consonant clusters
but you never have to write a CCV syllable or a VCC syllable - only
V, CV, CVC.

Suzanne

FYI, there's a story about a new alphabet in Senegal - "Typafrica" - developed
by a retired professor. No one has more info, though from Google it seems it
was reported by PanaPress (which requires paid subscription to view its
articles). If anyone knows more, we'd appreciate hearing...

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net



----- Forwarded message from Patrick Andries <patrick@...> -----
     Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 14:02:34 -0700
     From: Patrick Andries <patrick@...>
Reply-To: Unicode-Afrique@...
  Subject: Re: [Unicode-Afr] Re: Typafrica
       To: Unicode-Afrique@...

Stephane Bortzmeyer a écrit :

>>Un professeur sénégalais en retraite vient d'inventer un nouvel
>>alphabet, Typafrica, qui a l'ambition de « couvrir » l'ensemble des
>>langues autochtones du continent noir.
>>
>>
>
>
>Où ont été publiés les détails sur cet alphabet ?
>
>
Je ne sais pas, c'est en partie pour en obtenir plus que j'ai envoyé le
message.

P. A.




Liens Yahoo! Groupes







----- End forwarded message -----

Donald Z. Osborn wrote:
>
> FYI, there's a story about a new alphabet in Senegal - "Typafrica" - developed
> by a retired professor. No one has more info, though from Google it seems it
> was reported by PanaPress (which requires paid subscription to view its
> articles). If anyone knows more, we'd appreciate hearing...

One wonders what he thinks is wrong with the two previous efforts: the
Africa Alphabet of the 1920s and 1930s, which became the basis for many
orthographies of West African languages in particular, and the alphabet
(with no upper case) used in Dalby & Mann's Thesaurus of African
Languages (which has probably found no other use whatsoever, because it
has strange shapes and lots of non-roman letters, and the Africa
Alphabet has already been used successfully all over the place).

> Don Osborn
> Bisharat.net
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Patrick Andries <patrick@...> -----
>     Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 14:02:34 -0700
>     From: Patrick Andries <patrick@...>
> Reply-To: Unicode-Afrique@...
>  Subject: Re: [Unicode-Afr] Re: Typafrica
>       To: Unicode-Afrique@...
>
> Stephane Bortzmeyer a écrit :
>
> >>Un professeur sénégalais en retraite vient d'inventer un nouvel
> >>alphabet, Typafrica, qui a l'ambition de « couvrir » l'ensemble des
> >>langues autochtones du continent noir.
> >
> >Où ont été publiés les détails sur cet alphabet ?
> >
> Je ne sais pas, c'est en partie pour en obtenir plus que j'ai envoyé le
> message.
--
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@...

Send in your submissions now! Due date is May 20!

                             Call for Papers!

     Twenty-eighth Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC28)

       Unicode 4.1 - Multilingual Challenges and Solutions for 2006

                             See Call for Papers at:
                    http://www.global-conference.com/iuc28

                              September 7-9, 2005
                             Orlando, Florida, USA

                          Send in your submission now!

                      Submissions due: May 20, 2005
                    Notification date: June 10, 2005
                           Papers due: July 15, 2005

          Unicode 4.1 - Multilingual Challenges and Solutions for 2006

The Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC) is the premier
technical conference for software and multilingual computing, and it is
your source for the latest information on advances in the globalization
of software and the Internet. The 28th IUC features a number of
presentation formats including tutorials, workshops, lectures, and
panel discussions to support different learning styles

The release this year of version 4.1 brings us closer to 100,000
characters in the Unicode Character Standard.  Leaders in Software
and Web Internationalization will share their expertise and
best practices in working with the expanding character set and
identify new challenges and opportunities in multilingual computing.

You are invited to contribute to the discussion.  All topics related to
Unicode, software and Web internationalization, and specific regional
challenges are relevant, but emphasis will be given to topics that fit
this theme with a focus on actual practice.  The conference will also
explore how to make internationalization and localization more efficient
even when extending support to languages with complex processing and
rendering behavior.  There will be a track devoted to localization
standards, tools, methodologies and techniques.

The conference web site has more details and numerous example topics:
http://www.global-conference.com/iuc28


ATTENTION WEBSITE and SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!

Share your ideas for best practices for designing applications that can
accommodate any language.  If you are using Unicode in software or on
the Web, bring your experience, knowledge and any remaining questions
to light!  We invite you to submit papers describing challenges you
faced, lessons learned, and ideas for future implementation.  Our
audience is very interested in how Unicode and internationalization
are being applied in the real world.  Come and share your ideas with
the peers and industry experts in attendance.

INVITATION TO SUBMIT PAPERS

This is the premier technical conference for software and Web
internationalization and your source for the latest information on
standards, best practices, development tools and advances in the
globalization of software and the Internet.  The Internationalization &
Unicode Conference features a number of presentation formats including
tutorials, workshops, lectures, and panel discussions to support
different
learning styles. The conference also provides a forum for identifying
and
discussing new issues in internationalization.

Attendees benefit from the wide range of basic to advanced topics
and the opportunities for dialog and idea exchange with experts
and peers. We invite you to submit papers on the conference themes or
topics that relate to Unicode or any aspect of software and Web
Internationalization.

You can view the programs of previous conferences at:
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/conference/about-conf.html


COLLABORATION WITH TILP

The Institute of Localisation Professionals (TILP) will chair a
track during the conference, devoted to localization standards,
tools, methodologies and techniques. Improving efficiencies in
localization is key to enabling cost-effective, quick-to-market
support of new language versions of software.

Registration for the conference will grant access to the TILP
localization track. Speakers therefore will have opportunities to
reach a wider audience of localization and internationalization
management and professionals. We invite papers that are appropriate
for this expanded audience.

CONFERENCE ATTENDEES

Conference attendees are generally involved in either the
development and deployment of Unicode software, or the
globalization of software and the Internet.  They include
managers, software engineers, testers, systems analysts, program
managers, font designers, graphic designers, content developers,
web designers, web administrators, site coordinators, technical
writers, and product marketing personnel.

EXHIBIT OPPORTUNITIES

The Conference SHOWCASE area is for corporations and individuals
who wish to display and promote their products, technology and/or
services. Every effort will be made to provide maximum exposure,
advertising and traffic.

Exhibit space is limited.  For further information or to reserve a
place, please contact Global Meeting Services at
info@....

THE UNICODE CONSORTIUM

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization dedicated to
the development, maintenance and promotion of The Unicode
Standard, a worldwide character encoding.  The Unicode Standard
encodes the characters of the world's principal scripts and
languages, and is code-for-code identical to the international
standard ISO/IEC 10646.  The Consortium also defines character
properties and algorithms for use in implementations.  The
membership base of the Unicode Consortium includes major computer
corporations, software producers, database vendors, research
institutions, international agencies and various user groups.

For further information on the Unicode Standard, visit the
Unicode Web site at http://www.unicode.org or e-mail info@...
                            *  *  *  *  *

Unicode(r) and the Unicode logo are registered trademarks of Unicode,
Inc.
Used with permission.
Copyright 2005 Global Meeting Services, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.