Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 November 27

= November 27 =

Greek alphabet being first with vowels?
I was on the Greek alphabet page and I think I found an error but I was unable to add a discussion to the talk page as it came up as protected when I tried.

Sanskrit predates Greek by several hundred years and has 5 vowels and 4 semi-vowels.

In this page on the Greek alphabet it states " and was the first alphabetic script in history to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants" which I believe is untrue since Greek says it is from 800 BC but Sanskrit is from 1500 BC. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by RajiK10 (talk  o  contribs) 15:59, 27 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Sanskrit is not a script (writing system) but a natural language. The phonemes of that language - as for every other spoken human language - include vowels. The oldest attested writings use the Brahmi script, and later a variety of other Indic scripts has been used, today most commonly Devanagari. None of these Indic scripts is an alphabet ; although they encode for the vowels, they have no separate signs for vowels. It is meaningless to ask how to write an  in Devanagari. Instead, the consonant signs have a default /a/ vowel; to indicate another vowel, it is modified. The (possibly modified) signs correspond to syllables. The name abugida has been coined for this type of script. Yet another type includes the Arabic and Hebrew scripts, whose signs are basically just consonants without a vowel, and in which vowels are often not indicated, or else in the form of diacritics. This type of script is called an abjad. --Lambiam 16:45, 27 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Lambiam -- Under the basic traditional classification of alphabet vs. syllabary vs. logograms, Indic writing systems do fall under alphabets, since in a syllabary "ta" is likely to be written graphically completely independently from "to" etc (with no common visual element, as in the Japanese kana systems), and that's not what happens in Devanagari etc. This "abugida" etc. stuff are neologisms coined by one person in the late 20th century, which didn't clarify things as much as he thought they would, and certainly should not be allowed to redefine the meaning of the word "alphabet"... AnonMoos (talk) 19:18, 27 November 2021 (UTC)


 * that's your opinion. I don't agree. Traditional classifications can be superseded by ones that work better (eg parts of speech), and I find Peter Daniels' classification more useful. Amharic script is a abugida where a significant minority of the consonant-vowel combinations are not transparent and have to be learnt separately. Is that an alphabet or a syllabary? --ColinFine (talk) 23:00, 28 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Please look at a Japanese katakana or hiragana chart. As you look across the rows and columns, there's clearly nothing visually in common between the written syllable signs that would indicate when a syllable begins with "t", or when a syllable contains "a", etc.  That's the essence of a syllabary according to traditional valid definitions.  (The same with Linear B, etc.)  By contrast, in Ethiopic writing there is a lot in common between the symbols in each row, and also between the symbols in each column.  Therefore it's basically an alphabet, even though an unusal one with some idiosyncrasies or unpredictability in the combining of written consonant elements and written vocalic elements.  Peter Daniels can use invented words like "abugida" all he wants -- the only thing I'm asking is that he not try to change the accepted traditional meaning of the word "alphabet"... AnonMoos (talk) 12:48, 30 November 2021 (UTC)


 * P.S. I'm unaware of any great advance that has been made over traditional part-of-speech categories and is widely accepted in the linguistic analysis of English, other than the addition of a "determiner" category... AnonMoos (talk) 13:04, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
 * , if it's English that you're thinking of, try the realization that there is no concept of "conjunction" such that "subordinating conjunctions" and "coordinating conjunctions" are two varieties of the same general kind of thing, the acknowledgment that prepositions (like verbs) needn't have complements (and thus that most of what were "subordinating conjunctions" are actually prepositions), the distinction between determinative (a category, not only used as determiner) and determiner (a function, not limited to determinative), etc. All are briefly explained in Huddleston and Pullum's A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (whose second edition is coming out any day now) and explained in more depth in their The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. -- Hoary (talk) 11:52, 4 December 2021 (UTC)


 * RajiK10 -- Alphabetic writing in India dates to about 500 B.C., while alphabetic writing in Greece dates to a little after 800 B.C. Also, Indic alphabets usually only have full letters for vowels which occur at the beginnings of words -- vowels elsewhere in the word are basically written diacritically... AnonMoos (talk) 19:18, 27 November 2021 (UTC)