Re: TDC Type Salon: Conversation with John D. Berry & Saki Mafundik

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> >Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> >
> >>John Cowan wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>Well, he has a broad view of writing if it includes face painting!
> >>>Writing is generally understood to be the communication of linguistic
> >>>material in visual form, which excludes most of his examples (they
> >>>communicate, but what is communicated is not linguistic).
> >>>
> >>I'd have to agree there. Well.... there might be some wiggle-room;
> >>Sampson (I recall) gives an example in his book of a semasiography (??
> >>I might have completely misremembered this term), which manages to
> >>relate a very specific and coherent letter, but all through stylized
> >>drawings and conventions, not related to a specific language at all
> >>(mathematical notation might be considered a small version of this,
> >>since the math involved is not related to a specific language too).
> >
> >The point of that example is that meaning can be communicated _without_
> >reference to a specific linguistic form; thus it's not writing by any
> >useful definition of writing. See DeFrancis passim.
> >
> Mm, I probably misremembered the context. Reasonable enough. So this
> is communication by symbols, without language, while writing is
> *language* in symbols. I'll buy that.

"Writing is defined as _a system of more or less permanent marks used to
represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or
less exactly without the intervention of the utterer_." (WWS, p. 3)

As to the talks: Saki Mafundikwa didn't say a word about Afrikan
alphabets until the question period, when someone asked whether they've
been Unicoded; he said that Jason Glavy has made fonts for several of
them, and that Unicodization is in process. What he talked about was the
process that resulted in the book, which is an expansion of his Yale
M.A. thesis of ten years earlier. Like all of Batty's books, it's a
beautiful object.

John Berry talked about both the making of his edited volume on
newspaper design and its content. Even with the 30% event discount, it
was too expensive for me!
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...