Re: Alleged Syllabaries from Alphabets

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>

>wrote:

> See the publications of Konrad Tuchscherer.

Thanks. I don't know this.

> "It seems"?

A rhetorical use of the word seems.

>Do you not know David Dalby's articles? See Singler's
> bibliography in WWS.
>
> How did Taylor, <snip> "suppress" literacy? Isaac Taylor was
> a Durham (IIRC) cathedral canon and antiquarian.

No, Suppress use of syllabics. If you believe that the alphabet is
the most advanced then a syllabary must be less advanced.

>Sampson is a right-wing
> ideologue who used to dabble in linguistics. (He's moved on to

fighting

> with the Chomskyans full-time in "cognitive science.")

So I saw on his website!

Maybe just happenstance, but he and others by the 1980's were saying
that phonographic writing whether alphabetic or syllabic was equally
suitable for literacy.

>
> For anyone who needed to produce literacy materials (such as Bible
> translations). There are no Mende typewriters.

But there were Syllabics typewriters in Canada, newspapers, bibles,
newsletters, etc.

> Do you have any evidence that anyone thought "syllabary bad,

alphabet

> good"?

Andre Sjoberg expressed what I perceived to be the accepted belief in
the 1960's that the alphabet was most suited to literacy and
modernity. Therefore a syllabary would be less suited.

Certainly university linguists, 70's and 80's were determined to make
Cree and other native literacies more phonemic and they really felt
it would be better to use the alphabet. They were not trying to
suppress anything, they just wanted to promote literacy and thought
that an alphabet would be better than syllabics. Cree typewriters
were available but by this time, the early 80's the issue was the
computerization of all dictionaries and other linguistic material.

This is defintiely not a criticism of these linguits, but just to
comment on what I saw as a trend.

>I was hoping a while back that he would
> > know about G.Vico, who wrote about writing systems in the early

18th

> > century.
>
> He did??? Where, and what did he say?

I'll have to respond to this later - I don't have much.

>
> Can you tell me anything about the Henry Smith Williams *History of

the

> Art of Writing*

Another book of Williams is on the interent in its entirety and
mentions his view of the alphabet. I'll find it later.

Suzanne