--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> To me. What's my theory about the origins of writing?

I think it is about how the first scripts originated for languages
with monosyllabic morphemes. However, I am not sure.

This requires having one-to-one mapping for morpheme, syllable and
symbol, which I got from DeFrancis work on Chinese. He may not have
said this exactly but I infered that from the label
of 'morphosyllabic' DeFrancis, 1989.

> If you refuse to read anything I've published, there's no point in

my

> even opening your messages any more.

It is not intentional and I do not do this to antagonize you. I
really have very little time now between work and home.

> It was not known to I. J. Gelb. No other only American linguist

wrote

> about writing until after he died. (And Sampson came out only months
> before that,and he has no theory/vision at all.)

True.

> No. The important thing is to recognize _how different_ they are --

for

> a century they were all lumped together as "syllabaries,"

no - neosyllabaries were intended as a separate but related group.

and the study

> of the history of writing systems was at an impasse.

Yes, that is true, but the impasse was that they are both alike and
different.

> What literature? What "serious paper"s?

I think Sproat's article really is and I can't remember any other
titles right now.

> It certainly does, and this confusion may stem from the Unicode

screwup

> that was uncovered here last year.

No, no, no - not Unicode and not Sproat - just a proliferation of
things like web dictionaires and things that get passed around -
amateur sites that like to line things up and make them systematic.
People like to organize things into categories. Cree is almost always
described as an abugida by those who use the term.

To clarify, I have never intended to say that readers of Cree, Tamil
etc. don't notice and take advantage of the systematic similarities
in the script.

However, being conscious of the similarities is not the same thing as
actually segmenting the sounds into isolated units. The sound one
makes in segmenting b from bat is 'buh', and this _stands for_ the
abstract phoneme, so the relationship between symbol and sound is
more remote.

The ability to actually in a very concrete sense segment, is, of
itself, something which divides scripts into the syllabically
organized type or the segmentally organized type. But this isn't as
narrow as the inherent 'a' label. It is really a functional type.

Suzanne