Re: Neosyllabaries

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> > To me. What's my theory about the origins of writing?
>
> I think it is about how the first scripts originated for languages
> with monosyllabic morphemes. However, I am not sure.
>
> This requires having one-to-one mapping for morpheme, syllable and
> symbol, which I got from DeFrancis work on Chinese. He may not have
> said this exactly but I infered that from the label
> of 'morphosyllabic' DeFrancis, 1989.
>
> > If you refuse to read anything I've published, there's no point in my
> > even opening your messages any more.
>
> It is not intentional and I do not do this to antagonize you. I
> really have very little time now between work and home.

Yet you have time to enter that vault to read Cohen and Février, and
something in four volumes published in 1902 that I've never seen or even
heard of. I set aside that message of yours in order to be able to ask
about it.

> > It was not known to I. J. Gelb. No other only American linguist wrote
> > about writing until after he died. (And Sampson came out only months
> > before that,and he has no theory/vision at all.)
>
> True.
>
> > No. The important thing is to recognize _how different_ they are -- for
> > a century they were all lumped together as "syllabaries,"
>
> no - neosyllabaries were intended as a separate but related group.
>
> > and the study
> > of the history of writing systems was at an impasse.
>
> Yes, that is true, but the impasse was that they are both alike and
> different.
>
> > What literature? What "serious paper"s?
>
> I think Sproat's article really is and I can't remember any other
> titles right now.
>
> > It certainly does, and this confusion may stem from the Unicode screwup
> > that was uncovered here last year.
>
> No, no, no - not Unicode and not Sproat - just a proliferation of
> things like web dictionaires and things that get passed around -
> amateur sites that like to line things up and make them systematic.
> People like to organize things into categories. Cree is almost always
> described as an abugida by those who use the term.

And who would that be?

The Smithsonian this summer published a fancy book called something like
"Humans" (US$50) that has a very cogent section on writing and uses
"abjad" but not "abugida."

> To clarify, I have never intended to say that readers of Cree, Tamil
> etc. don't notice and take advantage of the systematic similarities
> in the script.
>
> However, being conscious of the similarities is not the same thing as
> actually segmenting the sounds into isolated units. The sound one
> makes in segmenting b from bat is 'buh', and this _stands for_ the
> abstract phoneme, so the relationship between symbol and sound is
> more remote.
>
> The ability to actually in a very concrete sense segment, is, of
> itself, something which divides scripts into the syllabically
> organized type or the segmentally organized type. But this isn't as
> narrow as the inherent 'a' label. It is really a functional type.

"The inherent 'a' label"?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...