Re: Language comparison

Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:
>> That's not the aim of writing narrowly considered, but of graphics
>> in general (as my art teacher was fond of saying).  We do have methods
>> of conveying specific meaning outside of speech; they're called icons,
>> the use of many of which are just as standardized as ordinary grammar.
>
> Then would you consider writing that only incidentally conveys speech
> - like Chinese - to be "real" writing? It's not phonetic; it cannot be
> said to be "writing down" speech any better than speech could be said
> to be "speaking out" the writing.
Writing conveys speech.  *Our* writing may do it [roughly] phonetically
or phonemically, but conveying speech at a syllabic, morphemic, or
lexical level is no less conveying speech.  (Even so, Chinese writing
does have its phonetic elements; they do still manage to borrow and
spell words like "Argentina".)

Now, one might be able to depart from this by writing semantically,
as may be possible in Japanese: when a character might represent several
different morphemes with the same meaning, the reader might extract
different speech than the writer encoded -- even more to the point,
a character might be used _iconically_ by the writer for its meaning
with no preconceived speech representation at all.  I don't know if
this happens, but I wouldnt be surprised if it did; however, I wouldn't
expect it to be a feature of running text, except perhaps in poetry.



	*Muke!
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