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Re: The Grand Canyon

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On 12/7/2014 6:48 PM, Jeff Higgins wrote:
> Is there such a thing as a vowel in Unicode?

There are five basic kinds of scripts:
* Alphabets (e.g., Latin)
* Abjads (e.g., Arabic)
* Abugidas (e.g., Devanagari)
* Syllabaries (e.g., Hiragana)
* Logographies (e.g., Hanzi)

These scripts are classified in this manner according to how they 
transcribe phonemes--logographs do not correspond phonetically (which is 
why there are thousands of Chinese characters), and syllabaries use a 
separate glyph for every utterable syllable. They're more common for 
relatively simple phonology such as Japanese.

In the other three kinds of scripts, each glyph roughly corresponds to 
an individual phoneme. In alphabets, consonant phonemes and vowel 
phonemes are transcribed as individual letters. In abjads, only 
consonants are transcribed, although vowel marks can be optionally used. 
Abugidas use diacritic forms to mark vowels but don't have distinct 
graphemes like alphabets do.

The term "vowel" is really a phonetic term--vowels are phonemes that 
have an open vocal tract. When we use the term to refer to a letter, 
we're presuming that there is a letter that corresponds to that phonemic 
value. This is really only true for alphabets, and is sort of true for 
abugidas or abjads, although since they're effectively diacritics there, 
which is another interesting issue.

As an aside, I believe there are more abugidas than there are alphabets, 
although the sheer use of the Latin script means that alphabets are the 
most common kind of script if you weight by number of people using the 
script.

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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Re: The Grand Canyon Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2014-12-07 19:30 -0500
  Re: The Grand Canyon Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2014-12-07 19:48 -0500
    Re: The Grand Canyon Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2014-12-07 21:44 -0500
    Re: The Grand Canyon Joshua Cranmer 🐧 <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2014-12-07 20:52 -0600
      Re: The Grand Canyon Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2014-12-07 22:33 -0500
        Re: The Grand Canyon Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2014-12-07 22:39 -0500
          Re: The Grand Canyon Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2014-12-07 22:42 -0500
            Re: The Grand Canyon Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2014-12-07 22:52 -0500
              Re: The Grand Canyon Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2014-12-07 22:58 -0500

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