SignWriting List Forum| Message 237 | Previous | Next [ Up Thread ] | Message Index |
|
SignWriting List Forum |
|||
|
|
From:
Joe Martin Date: Thu Jul 2, 1998 4:30 am Subject: Re: Nixograms | |
|
Earlier, Valerie wrote: I noticed this thread was entitled "Pictograms". I don't believe that SignWriting can be compared to "pictograms". Perhaps a linguist could help explain the difference - ............................... And she is totally right. A pictograph (or pictogram) is a picture of the thing that it represents. Like a stick figure of a person, you can tell what it is just by looking--no language is needed to interpret it. It could be "persona" or "hito" or "person" or a manual Sign. In contrast, a written word in whatever script, is not a picture of the thing it represents. Instead--in spoken language--it stands for a particular sound, a bunch of compression waves in the air. They're invisible--you can't draw a picture of them. The closest you could come would be a sonograph, which shows a lot of squiggly lines drawn on a screen by the vibrations. You have to be a real expert to read them, and they don't look a bit like a picture! SO those are the two main divisions of writing systems; Phonologic, based on sound, and Pictographic, based on image. (there are some other terms floating around, like semasiographic, ideograph, and logograph, but those are just for linguists to split hairs with:-) ------------------------- (you can stop here; this gets worse) ------------------------- SignWriting *looks* like pictographs. It is little pictures. BUT--this is important--they are not pics of the thing represented. Instead they are pictures of the word (the linguistic sign) that represents whatever it is. A pictogram of a tree would look like a little tree; but the signwriting symbol for the ASL Sign <tree> does not look like a tree. Well, a little, if you're drunk enough, but you get the idea; write <linguist> or <boring>; the SignWriting symbols don't look like the thing represented, they look like the linguistic symbol--the Sign (or word)--that does the representing. So at one level they are pictographs; little pictures of hands and faces. They are still very different from pictographic *Writing*, because at this level they don't have any meanings: nothing linguistic is involved yet. It isn't writing until it is plugged into a linguistic structure. Seeing the SignWriting symbol for a Sign, or the Sign itself even, doesn't do you any good if you don't know the language being represented. As Valerie points out, one particular sign (with its SignWriting symbol) has either the meaning "to cook" or "translate," depending on if you are using American or Danish Sign Language. The International Phonetic Alphabet does this same thing; one symbol for each sound, and no necesity to even know what the words mean, so you can hear it, transcribe it, and read (that is, pronounce) it back without ever knowing the meaning. Like in High School Spanish class. If somebody wrote the funny little IPA squiggles, upside down r's and stuff, you could sound them out, and have the word "red." You still wouldn't know what it meant though; is it English, meaning the color?--or is it the Spanish word for "net?" no language has entered into the picture yet. It seems to me, then, that we should ignore the pictographic aspect. (^_^)?? --------------------------- (I warned you to stop. It just gets worse yet!) --------------------------- In the case of SignWriting, how to "sound out" a word? We look at the little face and get the grammatical expression, look at the hand symbol and get the shape, check the shading for the orientation, the arrows for the movement, a quick look around the computer room to make sure you're alone, and produce the sign. We have to look at *All those symbols before we have the Sign. Without going into what makes a phoneme, that is why I don't think it is an alphabetic system. None of those symbols by themselves represents a segment the way a letter does, like [B] or [S]. The handshape, say, by itself is meaningless. What each symbol stands for is smaller than a segment;it is a subphonetic feature. In an alphabetic system each symbol represents a segment, and they follow each other sequentially. The little hands and faces don't seem to do this though, they gang up in groups to form segments, and these groups follow each other. There seems to be aproximatley a skazillion possible groups, and I can't imagine an alphabet with that many letters, but there can be an unlimited number of features. Whether the language it represents is manual or oral I think is kind of trivial; writing systems are classified by how they represent the linguistic structure of the language. The three basic ways are by the syllablic, segmental, or featural. This last class is represented by Pittman shorthand, and in part by the Cree/Inuit syllabary and also Korean HanGul--which is widely held to be the most perfect orthography known. Seems to me that SignWriting exemplifies this principle even more. So that's my take on this thing; if Albert or anybody is still reading this, what do you think? Hello? Hello? Anybody? Hellooo o o o o o . . . Joe Martin Plain Old Ordinary Student Western Washington Univ. |
|