Peter_Constable@... wrote:

>
> On 11/06/2001 10:13:59 PM "Gerald Lange" wrote:
>
> >I recently attended a Korean typographer's lecture where he mentioned
>
> >that pictographic symbols would be altered based on where the tongue
> >was placed when it made the sound.
> >
> >Am I reading your response wrong?
>
> I'm not questioning the view that different hangul consonant jamo
> correspond to points of articulation -- the same would be true, for
> that matter, of the Latin letters "p", "t", "k"; that's not
> particularly surprising. But these structural units (both the jamo and
> Latin letters) are representing phonological objects comparable to
> phonemes.
>
> It is not the case that a single jamo identifies just point of
> particulation (e.g. velar) and must be combined with a different jamo
> that identifies manner of articulation (e.g. oral stop vs. nasal
> stop), as well as other jamo for other similar things. (Imagine a
> Spanish writing system in which the phoneme /k/, which is a voiceless
> velar oral stop, was represented by a sequence of characters, "^o|"
> where "^" represents velar tongue position, "o" represents oral stop
> and "|" represents a lack of voicing.) But that's what it would have
> to be like to say that the writing system had structural units that
> corresponded to phonological *features*.

You'll have to take your fight to Geoffrey Sampson! (Or to Chin-Wu Kim
at U of Illinois, who used the same phrase in 1980 but didn't publish it
until 10 years later).

The script you describe is Bell's Visible Speech, where *every* feature
of each segment is depicted in the symbol.

Sampson doesn't, of course, claim that every feature is represented; but
that what is depicted is the features. Note that the means of deriving
the other letters are also metaphorical (if not iconic).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...