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Re: Language comparison

From:Muke Tever <hotblack@...>
Date:Saturday, January 8, 2005, 15:23
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! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/

Replies

Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
Sai Emrys <saizai@...>