From: Peter T. Daniels
Message: 2705
Date: 2004-07-02
>And Japanese literacyologists have been doing it for decades. But they
> > > This definition of logographic clears things up for me. I guess I
> > > missed Hockett.
> >
> > Review of *The World's Writing Systems*, in *Language*
>
> What year was this? I wonder if this followed Defrancis, also Wong,
> who argued for the term morphosyllabary.
> >
> > > However it is not a transparent or obvious
> > > definition. The problem is that if a logographic system is a
> > > syllabary that distinguishes homophones then what is an alphabetic
> > > system that distinguishes homophones -
> >
> > Nonexistent. An alphabetic system assigns symbols to segments.
> >
> > > quasi-logographic? How can
> > > Chinese and English be compared? One maps phonemes and the other
> > > syllables, both phonographic, but one is popularly categorized as
> > > phonographic and the other as logographic.
> >
> > Individual units of Chinese writing are logograms. Combinations of
> > letters in English must sometimes be taken as logographic units
> > (bomb/comb/tomb, women, perhaps a few dozen others, perhaps more).
>
> I agree that in English the orthography or combination of letters
> creates the morphological representation. In reading theory a highly
> morphophonemic system, e.g. English, is considered to contrast
> sharply with a more phonemic system, e.g. Spanish.
> >
> > > I prefer for myself the dichotomy of syllabic/phonemic, both are
> > > phonographic and some more or less morphological.
> >
> > Utterly useless. To suppose that Cherokee and Chinese writing are
> > remotely similar is just bizarre.
>
> Historically and formally, I suppose....
> Actually I have spent a significant amount of time watching both
> adults and children read and write Cree, Chinese and Tamil. To
> compare the cognitive processing involved is not bizarre, maybe
> mindbending but, in fact, useful.