suzmccarth wrote:
>
> --- 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.

Yet you have time to enter that vault to read Cohen and FĂ©vrier, and
something in four volumes published in 1902 that I've never seen or even
heard of. I set aside that message of yours in order to be able to ask
about it.

> > 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.

And who would that be?

The Smithsonian this summer published a fancy book called something like
"Humans" (US$50) that has a very cogent section on writing and uses
"abjad" but not "abugida."

> 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.

"The inherent 'a' label"?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...