Patrick Chew wrote:

>
> 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?

That was what I was presuming as too obvious to need to be stated, and
Michael seemed to presume was excluded.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...