Guys, It is near unfathomable that two highly respected experts can carry on
like this with name calling and hissy fits over capitalization.

FWIW, it took me less than a minute
<http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=2089346/grpspId=1705739206/msgId
=6617/stime=1160955545/nc1=3848643/nc2=3848541/nc3=3> to convert the mail
with caps to another form of rendering and paste it below.
If there is something else offensive about this to either party, then
perhaps silence or at best a private mail is in order.
Caps text replaced with title case and wrapped in: " Peter> <Peter "

tex

----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Everson < <mailto:everson@...> everson@...>
To: <mailto:qalam@yahoogroups.com> qalam@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 9:06:42 AM
Subject: Re: FW: [M_L] Re: Languages with writing systems?

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.

Peter>
Under what definition of "writing" is blissymbolics a writing system?
<Peter

>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.

Peter>
Then it is ipso facto not a writing system -- a purely (i don't know what
you mean by "truly") ideographic writing system is impossible.
<Peter

>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.

Peter>
That's just dumb. It would bleach the term "writing" of any meaning at all.
<Peter

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.

Peter>
If you outlaw "phonemes" for blissymbolics because they don't involve sound,
then you can't use "phonemes" for signed languages, and you might as well
stick with stokoe's term "cheremes." (i don't know why he chose that
particular greek root for his term.)

If blissymbolics does not exhibit duality of patterning, then it is ipso
facto not a human language. It's been a long time since i've seen my copy of
the book, and i don't recall the specifics. I think it does, though.
<Peter

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.

Peter>
"A written language" is the visibly recorded version of a language. If
blissymbolics is a language, it doesn't need a visibly recorded version of
itself, because it is already a visible record itself.

You can also record an asl utterance in stokoe's notation (which i've just
learned at sci.lang developed into something called "signfont") and follow
it with a spoken english translation. Is asl thereby a written or a spoken
language?
<Peter






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