Re: Alleged Syllabaries from Alphabets

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> >wrote:
>
> > See the publications of Konrad Tuchscherer.
>
> Thanks. I don't know this.

He says he's a qalam lurker, and he hasn't been returning phone calls
since February.

> > "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.

Does he believe the alphabet is the most advanced?

BTW (apropos of a different message or thread)

Over the weekend I found a typographic display of the kana called a
Japanese alphabet (in a book by Stephen Heller, extremely prolific
writer on design) & colleague on Art Deco typography from ca. 2000); and
noted that Taylor calls the Indian scripts "alphabets" (not
"syllabaries" -- but he was _barely_ aware of how vowels were notated
and may not have realized even that some vowel symbols appear to the
left of, i.e. before, the consonant symbols for the consonants that the
vowels follow).

> >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.

I don't think Gelb would have said otherwise, if he'd ever expressed an
opinion on 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.

There are fewer than 86 (or 84 or 88) symbols, no?

> > 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.

where "modernity" presumably includes typewriters.

I wanted to make a Vai font for WWS, but it couldn't be fitted into the
223 slots available in a Mac font (slightly fewer in a Windows font).

Don't start jumping on me, computer engineers. This was 1992-93.

> Certainly university linguists, 70's and 80's were determined to make
> Cree and other native literacies more phonemic and they really felt

You mean, make orthographies more phonemic?

> 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.

His History of Science (4v.) is available on Gutenberg -- the zip files
are only ~150 Kb each, so I downloaded them and found the place (v. 1,
chap. 4). He was not too badly informed, but he doesn't have anything
particularly interesting to say; doesn't, of course, mention India at
all.

I'll see the History of Writing tomorrow -- the NYPL's Jewish Division
has a copy, and there are _two_ librarians who know exactly where in the
collection it's shelved (even though the main collection's copy is "off
site," which means somewhere around Princeton, NJ, and there's no
guarantee they'd be able to find it, so the supposition that it's
available "in a day or two" is optimistic). But given what he said in
the HoS just a few years later, I'm not expecting too much. I do hope,
though, that the presentation will be Haut Art Nouveau.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...