Patrick Chew wrote:

>
> > > > His question is sound. A writing system needn't be phonetically based,
>
> >At 19:26 -0500 2003-12-12, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > >Name one that isn't.
>
> >At 06:28 PM 12/12/2003, you wrote:
> >SignWriting and other notation systems for Sign Languages. Blissymbols.
>
> So... one *could* contend that since "phonetics" more often than not refers
> to basic building blocks of (spoken) languages - the various sounds,
> phonations, etc. and we speak of places and manners of articulation of said
> sounds/phones, would it not be readily easy to look at places and manners
> of articulation in signed languages? If that's the case, since SignWriting
> often marks manner and place of "articulation," could it not also be
> considered a "phonetically" based writing system?

Stokoe's word "chereme" never caught on; sign linguists simply talk
about phonemes and everyone knows exactly what they mean. When I looked
at SignWriting to see if Brenda Farnell had said enough about it, in
1993 or so, it was clear that it didn't involve any sort of phonemic
analysis of ASL or any other language it might have been used for. Plus
permission was denied to reproduce any examples of it unless we paid
some enormous royalty.

(NB I didn't even bother asking Houghton Mifflin if I could show any
Tolkien scripts, since I could see that they _never_ appeared in any
sort of commercial application. The license must be very diligently
guarded.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...