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From:  Wayne in Maine
Date:  Wed Mar 15, 2000  10:16 am
Subject:  Re: SignWriting as a gateway?

Cecelia and Joe wrote:
>How do you tell the person watching you that THIS time, the sign MINE
>means MY and other times it means MINE?
>
>I don't know the answer to this; I assume it is a problem the designers of
>SEE and other systems have dealt with. Maybe a special accusative >case
>marker???

In modern English, "mine" is a possessive pronoun, substituting for a
known noun ("That is her car and this is mine"). "My" is a possessive
adjective which must be followed by a noun ("my car"). In Old English (yes,
Beowulf and all that), "my" was indeed "min" which developed into modern
English "mine" but lost its adjectival use except for a few fossilized forms
("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord" starts out the
Battle Hymn of the Republic). In any event, it would not have been nor is
it now an accusative case marker. For first person singular, the accusative
case form would be "me". Actually an accusative case "marker" would be like
the Japanese particle "(w)o" placed after a noun to mark it as the direct
object of the verb.

I know that similar polysemy is
>common--Chinese /TA/ comes to mind; it is articulated (signed/spoken) >the
>same for "he" or "her," but the written character is different.

True. In the spoken language, "ta" means either he or she (in some
situations even "it"), and the fact that there is (sometimes) a distinction
in the written form between masculine "ta" and feminine "ta" was largely the
result of Christian missionaries arriving in China to translate the Bible
and frustrated by the fact that the original "ta" character was used for
people of either sex. So along with developing a character for "she", they
even developed characters corresponding to "He" (the divinity), "it"
(things), and "it" (animals). See the GIF below.

I hope that SignWriting never goes beyond the phonetic level to start
making distinctions between, say, "he" and "she" that don't exist in the
language being transcribed.

- Wayne in Maine

Attachment
Ta.GIF
Type: image/gif
Size: 4k
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  Replies Author Date
3099 Re: SignWriting as a gateway? Cecelia Smith Wed  3/15/2000
3108 Re: SignWriting as a gateway? James Womack Wed  3/15/2000
3110 Re: SignWriting as a gateway? James Womack Wed  3/15/2000
3118 Re: SignWriting as a gateway? Ronald Zapien Fri  3/17/2000
3126 Re: SignWriting as a gateway? cmf Fri  3/17/2000
3127 The view from ringside Joe Martin Fri  3/17/2000
3129 Re: SignWriting as a gateway? James Womack Fri  3/17/2000
3142 Re: SignWriting as a gateway? James Womack Mon  3/20/2000
3143 Re: SignWriting as a gateway? Valerie Sutton Mon  3/20/2000

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