Alternatives to alphabet?

[crezac]

Everything I see points to alphabet (i.e. 1 glyph = 1 segmental phoneme, basically)

• Number of glyphs matches alphabets
  
• Apparent pronounceability and consonant/vowel alternation when viewed as alphabetic
  
• Apparent derivation from Roman alphabet and Latin abbreviation means the script creator was familiar with alphabetic writing
  
• Structure and symmetry of the glyph set is similar to what is seen in phoneme inventories of natural languages
  
• Word length
  

The only other possibility is that glyphs represent sub-alphabetic units

 
Thanks, I'm so much happier that this has all been reduced to two possibilities.  Damn, there went my New Year's resolution to stop being sarcastic.  Oh well, at least I lasted longer than last year.

The assertion that the number of glyphs matches alphabetic is a weak assertion since we aren't sure how many glyphs there are or what they encode.  Even if we accept that some of them encode phonemes we don't know how many is enough for the language. Even in English we don't have a one to one correspondence. This looks like an excuse to call it an alphabet more than it does evidence.  I will translate "Apparent" on your next two points as "I'm guessing",  correct me if that wasn't what you meant but the pronouncability is only there because you have decided vowel and consonants need to alternate.   And seeing something similar to an alphabet as proof of a specific origin is like saying a chihuahua is a rodent because it's similar to a rat to anyone familiar with mammalian phenotypes.  I'm not sure I understand your fourth point,  but the word similar makes me dislike it a little.   I'm afraid the fifth point needs a bit more development as well.  

The point of Emma's question seems to have been to ask for alternatives to an alphabet.  I'm sure she's already familiar with all the arguments for an alphabet and wants to consider other possibilities.  It's really not a matter of what everything you see points to, it's whether you're not seeing something obvious or if you've stopped looking because you are already seeing what you want to see.  With that in mind could you explain what you mean by sub-alphabetic units.  Surely you aren't suggesting that two or more glyphs combine to represent a single phoneme?

On a different topics, but still part of this thread, the possibility of symbolic representation wasn't intended to indicate a code or an artificial language.  I'm still suggesting a written encoding that the scribe could have read aloud from the page with no need to calculate or convert anything.  Just because the written language might have incorporated information like gender or plurality with position or a special glyph doesn't mean the spoken language didn't use special words, tonal emphasis, phonemic suffixes or something else to indicate the same things  Every written language is by definition artificial*.  I doubt even Chomsky would argue that how language is written is encoded in deep structure.

My point in offering alternatives is to contribute to a discussion, not to push forward a particular theory or kill anyone's sacred cows.  But I don't mind pointing out that some of those cows haven't moved in a while and don't smell so good.

*if you don't believe written language is artificial explain the reason for the spellings and pronunciations of hinge and hung or through and throw and thorough,  explain why English uses ye as an archaic form of the (hint: ye ole th sound used to be represented by a single character),  research why an ampersand is called an ampersand and you'll realize that and used to be a letter of the alphabet.   I would argue that many of the tools we use to perform analyses such as count word distribution or phoneme frequency do not always accurately distinguish between the complexity of spoken language and the simplification and shortcuts used to write things down in English.   They do not work as well as they should with known languages.