Alphabet, Abjad and so forth

[Benjamin Fortson]

Thanks for all the interesting additional info on Thai!

Ben

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, James E. Clapp wrote:

> Benjamin Fortson writes:
>
> > > [JC:] It was not until around the fourth century BC that stunningly modern
> > > phonetic analysis made possible a reordering of the consonants into neat
> > > rows and columns according where the sound was made in the mouth (the rows)
> > > and whether it was voiced or unvoiced, aspirated or unaspirated, continuant,
> > > and the like (the columns).  Unfortunately for us, that intellectual
> > > achievement occurred in India, too far away and too late to influence the
> > > order of the Greek alphabet.  So we are stuck with an alphabet that is
> > > pretty much in random order (except in a historical sense), but at least it
> > > includes letters for the vowels; South and Southeast Asian alphabets derived
> > > from the Indic offshoot of the original Semitic writing systems have neatly
> > > organized alphabets based upon scientific phonetic principles, but generally
> > > lack full-fledged letters for the vowels sounds.
> >
> > [BF:]All true except for the end--these alphabets *do* have full-fledged signs
> > for the vowels (and diphthongs). But because the consonant signs "include"
> > in their pronunciation a following vowel "a", which can be modified by the
> > addition of superscript, subscript, preceding, or following marks, the
> > vowel letters are only needed word-initially, or word-internally following
> > another vowel sound.
>
>
> You're being generous.  My effort to summarize the 3500-year history of
> alphabetic writing in three or four paragraphs necessarily involved such
> oversimplification that it is a stretch to call any of it "true."  I'd hoped
> that by including enough weasel words (". . . *generally* lack *full-fledged*
> letters for the vowel sounds") I could allude to a fundamental structural
> difference between western alphabets derived from Greek and eastern writing
> systems derived from the Brahmi script that took form in India circa 4th century
> B.C.E. without going into detail about the latter--which is pretty far afield
> for this list.
>
> But of course you are right: the Brahmi-based scripts do have marks for most
> of the vowel sounds.  As stated by Richard G. Salomon in the introduction to
> Part VI ("South Asian Writing Systems") in _The World's Writing Systems_ (cited
> in full in my first posting in this thread), p. 372:
>
>           ". . . in systemic terms, the Indic scripts typically
>           share the same basic principles of the aksara system,
>           i.e. a modified consonantal syllabary representing most
>           vowels by diacritic signs attached to the consonants."
>
> William Bright, in the book's article on "The Devanagari Script," characterizes
> such scripts as follows (p. 384):
>
>           "Typologically, it is what I call an alphasyllabary:
>           that is, it writes each consonant-vowel sequence as a
>           unit, called an aksara, in which the vowel functions
>           as an obligatory diacritic to the consonant; in the
>           terminology of Daniels . . . , it is an abugida."
>
> [See the definitions of "alphasyllabary" and "abugida" quoted from that book in
> my original post.]
>
> Of course, as you point out, there is no mark for the vowel sound regarded as
> "inherent" in the consonant, and in most such scripts there is, in addition to
> the set of diacritics, a separate set of entirely different symbols for the
> vowels that occur at the beginning of a line (or, in scripts that separate the
> words, at the beginning of a word).
>
> In Thai--the only such language I've actually studied--the unwritten (or "zero"
> or "inherent") vowel has different phonetic values in syllable-medial and
> syllable-final position, and the written vowel signs take different written
> forms in those two contexts.  As to the written symbols, some are placed after
> the consonant with which they are associated (just as a vowel letter in a Greek-
> derived script would be), others over or under or before the consonant, others
> in two parts before and after the consonant, and still others in three parts
> before and over and after the consonant.  There are no special symbols for
> initial vowels as in Devanagari; instead, a dummy consonant is put at the
> beginning of words whose pronunciation begins with a vowel sound as a
> placeholder to write the vowel symbol(s) around.  When the first sound in the
> word is one of the unwritten vowels, you have the surreal phenomenon of an
> unpronounced consonant inserted to indicate the presence of an unwritten vowel.
> (It's like the pantomime in the final scene of Antonioni's "Blow-Up": in an
> imaginary tennis game, it shows where the viewer is to imagine the ball would be
> if the game were played with a ball--which it's not, because the pantomime *is*
> the game.)  And just to torture us foreign students further, that placeholder is
> a symbol that, depending upon the context (which is extremely hard to determine
> since the Thais view spaces between words as a crutch appropriate only for
> children's primers), can itself function as a vowel symbol--or occasionally
> neither as a vowel nor as a dummy consonant, but as a tone indicator.  Because
> the vowels--even the unwritten ones--exist conceptually and physically only in
> relation to consonants, the words on a vertical Thai sign (on a shop or theater)
> are stacked syllable by syllable; there isn't any way to sever the vowels from
> the consonants to which they belong so as to stack them as we might the letters
> R-O-X-Y or B-O-O-K-S.
>
> So that's what I was trying to get at with my one admittedly inadequate
> sentence: Thanks to the Indian pandits the Thais have an elegantly ordered array
> of consonants, but their system for indicating (or not indicating) vowels is a
> mess; thanks to the Greeks we have an alphabetical order that only a Phoenician
> of the year 1000 B.C. could love, but it includes vowels as letters.  As one who
> has worked with dictionaries in both languages, I'm grateful to the Greeks!
>
> James E. Clapp
> Author of Random House Webster's Dictionary of the Law
>