Lars,
My greater issue with your type classification has to do with
my disagreement about how you have defined some of the
types. I'm not disagreeing that there are functionally
definable types for scripts, and that it is useful to divide
up the scripts into those categories. But I disagree with
some of the details of your definitions and about what got
classified as what type.
Issue 1. Abugida and Alphasyllabary
You've defined abugida as "a type of writing system whose basic
characters denote consonants followed by a particular vowel,
and in which diacritics denote the other vowels." You then
point to Ethiopic, Cree (= UCAS in Unicode), and Tengwar as
having that characteristic. But cf. Peter Daniels' definition
of abugida:
"In an abugida, each character denotes a consonant accompanied
by a specific vowel, and the other vowels are denoted by a
consistant modification of the consonant symbols, as in Indic
scripts."
In other words, Daniels is defining an abugida in such a way as
to include all the Brahmi-derived scripts, which you have
*excluded* from your definition of an abugida.
I think Daniels' definition makes more sense, and we are planning
to make use of it in the next edition of the Unicode Standard.
Ethiopic is an interesting case. It is the original "abugida"
in grammatology, but it started out as a Semitic-derived abjad,
and in many ways it is more convenient now to analyze it as
a featural syllabary. That is how we ended up encoding it in
Unicode, how it is generally presented, and how many people
think and interact with it. While the various flags and loops
associated with the vowel ranks in Ethiopic obviously have
a featural consistency, they don't have the kind of independent
existence that the Indic matras typically have; instead, partly
because of the complex placement rules for the flags and loops,
depending on the shapes of the consonant bases, in Ethiopic
it makes more sense to just see each combination as a syllabic
unit as a whole, with "hints" about the vowel.
The Canadian aboriginal syllabics, derived from a shorthand
system, also should be analyzed as a featural syllabary, in
my opinion.
So I think the right thing to do here is to move your instances
of "abugida" into featural syllabaries, and redefine your
"alphasyllabary" as "abugida", more in line with Daniels'
definition.
Also, regarding your current class of "alphasyllabary", I don't
think the critical issue here is linear order "that is congruent
with their temporal order in speech." While it is true that
many of the Brahmi-derived scripts now have reordrant or
surroundrant vowel matras, for various reasons related to the
writing history of the scripts (vowel marks on top that
"migrated" around to the left of their consonant bases,
mostly), there are also simplified descendants that would be
hard-put to fit your definition. Take Tagalog, for example. It
has two vowel marks, a dot above for /i/ and a dot below for /u/.
On this basis alone, it would be hard to distinguish it from
an abjad (consonant writing). The crucial difference, which tips
it over to an abugida, along with the other Brahmi-derived scripts,
is that the consonant letters all have the inherent vowel /a/.
So /ka/ is just a single letter, /ki/ is /ka/ + /i/, /ku/ is
/ka/ + /u/. And there is a killer (a different dot below), that
is used to suppress the inherent /a/. *That* is the pattern which
distinguishes all the Brahmi-derived abugidas, simple or complex.
Issue 2. Featural script
You define this as "a type of writing system whose characters
denote phonetic features," and give one example: Hangul.
Since Hangul characters (either considering the syllables as
units or the jamo as units) don't "denote phonetic features"
per se, even Hangul wouldn't fit that definition.
The way Daniels defines it is "In a featural system, like
Korean or 'phonotypic' shorthand, the shapes of the characters
correlate with distinctive features of the segments of the
language." Taken as a syllabary, Korean fits that bill, since
the parts of the syllable (the jamo) do *correlate* with
distinctive segmental features of the language. Furthermore,
the single versus double jamo spelling for initial consonants
correlates with the systematic manner distinction for consonants
in Korean. Looked at this way, UCAS obviously fits as well,
since the rotations and dot additions are systematically
correlated with segmental distinctions in the various language
phonologies. And if Ethiopic is treated as a syllabary, it, too,
can be seen as a featural system.
The distinction from non-featural syllabaries is that in the
non-featural systems (Kana, Yi, ...) you cannot point to any
graphic part of any of the symbols, and parse it off as having
any systematic correlation with segments of the sound system.
(Of course nothing is black and white here -- the voicing marks
of Kana obviously are featural, and the tone marks for Yi are
also featural.)
--Ken
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