Re: Which scripts show syllable breaks

Peter T. Daniels:

> Joachim Pense wrote:
>>
>> Am Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:13:55 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:
>>
>> > Joachim Pense wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Am Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:35:18 +0000 schrieb Steve Jones:
>> >>
>> >>> ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> >>>> Which, if any, languages are normally written using scripts and
>> >>>> conventions that tell the reader where the syllable breaks are?
>> >> ...
>> >>> syllabaries
>> >>
>> >> Probably; which? Certainly not the Japanese syllabaries, they indicate
>> >> moras.
>> >>
>> >> OTOH chinese script, which is not a syllabary, does indicate the
>> >> syllable breakes.
>> >
>> > What do you mean by "syllabary," such that neither Japanese nor Chinese
>> > qualifies?
>>
>> Japanese is normally called a syllabary; but it does not indicate the
>> syllable breaks.
>
> It does to anyone who can read it.

In most cases. Yet it does not indicate the breaks explicitly. Cases where
it does not work are word composition positions (what's the English term?
We call it "Fuge" in German); when an o and an u are adjacent here, they
must be pronounced as separate o and u, and not as a long o.



>>
>> > Morphosyllabaries record syllables with meanings.
>>
>> Ok. So Chinese characters form a morphosyllabary. Makes sense. At least
>> extensionally (and that's probably what counts, because modern
>> linguistics is a child of the twentieth century). But intensionally (or
>> do you call that word "intentionally" in English?) I have my doubts.
>> Chinese characters record morphemes with meanings, and the morphemes
>> happen to be syllables. But if there was a sound change so what now is a
>> syllable would become two-syllable units, the characters would denote the
>> two-syllable units. This is because the idea of the characters is to
>> denote morphemes, not syllables.
>
> There are two-syllable morphemes in Chinese ('butterfly' is the famous
> one; others were posted here just a few days ago), and they are written
> with two characters.

I did not know that. Do these characters have meanings when they stand
alone?

>
> Some examples of morphemes growing new syllables?

No. As I said, Extensionally it would be a (morpho)syllabary (ignoring the
special cases you mention above for now). I was just phantazising that
maybe long vowels could change into diphtongs, and further split into two
separate vowels in separate syllables. As I said, purely hyphothetically.
My point is: does it make sense to talk about a morphosyllabary if the fact
that the characters denote syllables is just by accident, because the
morphemes happen to coincide with syllables?

Joachim
.

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