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

> Did I mention I met David Olson last month when he was here to
> participate in an NYU seminar? A very nice Canadian (which is to

say, he

> refused to dispute anything I said, even when it directly

contradicted

> something he'd said) who readily admits he doesn't know anything

about

> writing systems or linguistics --

Let's just say he has lost interest in writing systems. I attended a
graduate seminar with him for a while related to literacy and
cognitve psychology.

> I remain unimpressed with Richard Sproat. In Antwerp he spent the

first

> half of his talk outlining some sort of computational notation

system

> having to do with the study of writing systems (maybe), and then

did not

> use it or refer to it in the contentual portion of his talk.

I still consider the bidimesional arrangement essential, - that is
directly from DeFrancis, 1989, the duality principle. Then the types
of phonology can be lined up afterward as alphabet, abjad, abugida,
compositional syllabic (alphasyllabary) and syllabic. Sproat has put
Indic scripts in line with alphabets and really doesn't give a
conceptual reason for his phonological types.

However, he still claims that his contribution is putting amount of
logography orthogonal to phonological types as a 'new proposal' when
I had already published this.

> He doesn't even have the excuse that he's never seen that

particular

> volume (which is too expensive to buy and too esoteric for

libraries

> around here to acquire).

Obviously Rogers has Taylor & Olson, 1995, but for some reason he
makes a point of calling this Sproat's taxonomy on his website - I
suppose he does that in his book too.

I look back now and think that DeFrancis' book 1989 was the turning
point for how logography and phonology were treated and I just
developed a tsble for it. Actually I didin't even have Visble Speech
at the time but just the chapter DeFrancis wrote, which I thought
was written after Visible Speech but in looking back I can see was
written before.

I don't think Rogers was very happy with me telling him in 1991 that
the phonolographic/logographic dichotomy wasn't an adequate typology
for writing systems - he was very attached to it at the time. He was
very dismissive of thinking that alphabets and syllabic systems
differed at all except in their suitability to certain lgs.

Rogers may have knowledge about writing systems but no awareness of
literacy and the function of literacy. It was the history of
literacy and function of literacy domain that I studied at OISE with
Olson et al but Rogers has no coneection to that that I was aware
of.

In any case this is why I don't like Rogers' book as well as the
moraic stuff.

Suzanne