Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

On Tuesday, April 13, 2004, at 05:52 AM, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> From:    Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
>> - as I said, we indeed communicate (on the list)
>> WITHOUT phonology, because our messages are 100%
>> written. I have no microphone connected to my PC.
>
> But that's not what the debate is about. The debate is about
> what use phonology and phonetics have -- "are they interesting" --
> and whether you can understand human language without it. And
> the answer to that is:  you can't.  The fact that we can now
> communicate as well as we do via the internet does not diminish
> the fact that it does not capture all aspects of human speech.
Indeed not. For all its many imperfections, written English is an encoding
of _spoken_ English. When I type - as  I am at the moment - I am very
aware of the sound of the words I'm using.

As I've observed before, humans were communicating with sound for
millennia before any written or other graphical representation of those
sounds were devised. All the written/graphical representations of natlangs
I've come across - and that's quite a few - are/were attempts to encode
the _spoken_ language.

I was once held that ancient Egyptian writing represented ideas, not
sounds or actual words of the language, in an almost mystical way.  But
that was shown for the nonsense it is by Champollion's decipherment of
ancient Egyptian scripts.

A similar myth was held about Chinese writing. Indeed, when Chinese
writing became known to 17th cent Europe it coincided with the development
of symbolic algebra, the invention of logarithms and the calculus, so
there's little surprise that it was misunderstood regarded by many as
ideographic, i.e. the depiction of ideas or concepts with no regard to the
spoken language. Some of the 17th cent conlangers like Bishop Wilkins
designed what were intended as universal _pasigraphies_, i.e. a written
language that represented ideas/concepts which everyone in the world can
'read' in their own language whatever it may be. AFAIK, pasigraphies are
still occasionally designed; but they are all _conlangs_.

As for Chinese writing, let me just give two quotes from the Chinese
linguist, Yuen Ren Chao:
1. "Characters under the preceding three categories {pictographs,
ideographs, compound ideographs} are often taken as representative of
Chinese writing, but actually form only a small minority of characters,
and it must be remembered that they represent words (or rather morphemes)
and do not directly represent meanings. They are therefore strictly not
pictographs or ideographs, but, to follow Peter A. Boodberg's terminology,
  _logographs_, that is, written forms to represent spoken words."

{I would deary have liked to add emphases to certain phrases, but I've
left it as Y.R. Chao wrote it, apart from the explanatory parenthesis
enclosed between braces (curly brackets). Y.R. Chao then goes onto discuss
'loan characters', i.e. one used for its _phonetic value_ and phonetic
compounds.}

2. "It is making a false dichotomy to say that Chinese writing represents
meaning and that syllabic and alphabetic writing represents sound. The
written symbol {person symbol} represents as much the spoken word _jén_ as
the meaning 'man'; the written form _man_ represents as much the meaning
'human being' as the sound [mæn]. The important difference is the size and
variety of the units."

{Y.R. Chao's _jén_ is spelled _rén_ in China's official Pinyin system,
pronounced}

Altho AFAIK no one entertains ideas about ancient Egyptian writing being
ideograms, the myth still hasn't disappeared with regard to Chinese
writing. But the point I'm trying to make is that all natlang writing
systems are secondary and are attempts in one way or another to encode the
_spoken_ language.

>> So you first had to think: what is tense ?
>> what concept is that ? shall I use it ? This of course
>> all IMHO.
>
> Beside the point.  No one here -- certainly not me -- is suggesting
> phonology should take some kind of priveleged position among
> the modules.
Quite beside the point. Whether the verbs are to show tense (or even te
adjectives and/or nouns - not unknown in natlangs) is not dependent upon
the phonology, nor the phonology upon whether one has tense or not.

>  Of course you have to think about the other modules,
> and they have their place.  But I would dispute the idea that you
> have to create your conlangs in some kind of hiearchical order;
Absolutely - as I've said once or twice: it depends _why_ you are
designing your conlang.

[snip]
>> languages use other systems ? In that case, it would
>> also be somehow peripheral, or superficial (in the
>> meaning of surface forms), the really important thing
>> being the deep (conceptual) structure: what do such
>> forms really mean
Ah - our Philippe is a Chomskyite! The trouble is that we do not all hold
to the _theory_ (and that's all it is) of deep (conceptual) structure and
'peripheral' surface forms.  Indeed, altho deep structure is a central
theoretical term of most versions of transformation grammar, some
generative studies, I understand, have called into question the role of
deep structure, suggesting that a separate level of underlying syntactic
organization between surface and meaning is unnecessary and misleading.

Even those on this list who do go along with deep structure theories have
not IME raised such theories to the status of an ideology. We've generally
got along here with a "live & let live" attitude, whether in the type of
conlang that interests us, the approach we take in their creation or the
linguistic theories we may or may not hold.

> Hardly.  You're missing the point.  The point was that a property
> of verbs -- whether they take complements, and if so what kinds of
> complements -- is fundamental to understanding grammatical patterning.
Yep - pretty much so.

> I was suggesting that minimizing the role of phonology is like
> suggesting the complexities of complementation are not "interesting"
Yes - those who know me will know that I'll find phonology more
"interesting" than the complexities of complementation, but I'm not so
narrow minded as to suggest that one is more important than the other.

> -- even though so much of grammatical questions revolve around it.
> Likewise, many morphological questions (reduplication, e.g.) involve
> questions of phonological structure just as much as morphological or
> syntactic ones.  You simply can't ignore that fact.
Well, yes - reduplication takes several different phonological forms in
real natlangs and is used for a variety of morphological and semantic
purposes. It's rather difficult, as I see it, to deal with features like
reduplication without involving all these considerations. To impose an
ideologicaly formulated hierarchy of approach.
=================================================================
On Monday, April 12, 2004, at 08:40 PM, Gary Shannon wrote:

> This has been an interesting thread and I've enjoyed
> reading all the replies to my original post.  While
[snip]

> in.  It always feels good to shake off a bit one's
> ignorance. :)
>
> Thanks to all who posted.
Maybe, with that this thread can be wound up   ;)

Ray
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