At 05:27 -0700 2006-10-11, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>We have been through this before.
>
>Under what definition of "writing" is Blissymbolics a writing system?
It is, um... written. With a pen. With chalk. With a computer.
>It may be a language that operates exclusively in a visual medium,
>but it isn't a writing system.
In my view, Bliss is a truly ideographic script.
>What language does it encode if it's a writing system?
It's eponymous: The language is Blissymbols and its writing system
has the same name.
Of course cases like these are edge-cases. For years people did not
believe that Signed languges were true languages, but we now know
that they are. They have "phonemes" (a word we prefer to "kinemes" or
whatever). They can be written, certainly, as SignWriting shows us.
Bliss doesn't have "phonemes" because its users may suffer from a
variety of maladies many of which prevent spoken language entirely.
Its speakers *do* speak using language. It's just that their language
is only written.
I would not distinguish between "a language that operates exclusively
in a visual medium" and "a written language" because, well, it's
writing. I can write a sentence in Bliss with a pen on paper and
follow it with an English translation, also written on paper.
--
Michael Everson *
http://www.evertype.com