Re: phoneticism. phonemicism, signed lg writing...

At 10:02 PM 12/12/2003, you wrote:

>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.

Whether it be chereme or cherete, the distinction would still be
the same, no? With your comment earlier that Stokoe's notation was
"phonemic," and the relative transparency of SignWriting corresponding to a
graphic representation of a sign's production, SignWriting indeed has no
overt phonemic analysis of any of the signed languages for which there are
localized versions, the fact that place, articulator(s), and manner are
encoded would show it to be at least either phonetic or "orthographic."

As you mentioned in a previous post,

"How about this: to a grammatologist, writing system vs. script is like
language vs. dialect to a linguist. Neither interesting nor relevant nor
decidable within the system."

"Sign linguists" are still linguists... the precedent set for phone/phoneme
for spoken languages is still analogically applicable to signed languages,
right? Even within signed languages, the "phonetic"/contextual variations
of idealized/citation forms/shapes/"phonemes" mimic what we observe in
spoken languages - why would conceptual distinctions (read: the Wheel) need
to be re-invented?

-Patrick