Talk:Kannada

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by PierreAbbat (talk | contribs) at 22:32, 22 April 2002 (abjad? abugida?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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I don't think Kannada has 52 "alphabets". I suppose it should be letters, or letter symbols, or syllable symbols etc. Should be checked. -- Calypso

The language has 52 characters in its alphabet and is phonetic, but cannot represent all phonemes.

Could someone explain this statement? I can't make head nor tail of it; as far as I can tell, it's saying that the Kannada alphabet (actually an abjad) has a clear 1-to-1 (or at worst many-to-1) relationship between letters and sounds (phones), such that anyone familiar with the rules of the script can correctly pronounce anything written in the language (this being what makes a script "phonetic")... okay, makes sense so far... but that it cannot represent all the meaningfully distinctive sounds (phonemes) in the language. The only way to reconcile the second part of the statement with the first is if there are phonemes that are never realized as phones (sounds) in the language... in which case they aren't in the language, and aren't going to get written down either. So what is this supposed to say? Brion VIBBER

Are you sure it's an abjad? The Dravidian languages I've seen, like their Indic neighbors to the north, are written with abugidas. --phma

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