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From:
Charles Butler Date: Fri Jan 1, 1999 5:12 pm Subject: Re: Yeow! | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Joe Martin wrote: > > Thank you Bill! I was hoping somebody would jump on that Chinese thing. A question is--can you write Sign languae in Chinese characters? (I know, its a weird question, but linguists are like that) It's not a bad question at all. I have heard from a Tibetan Buddhist friend of mine that Tibetan Monastery Sign Language may have formed some of the basis for Chinese calligraphy, precisely because Tibetan monks formed the backbone of the court system and wished a way to write ideas down which would not be based upon any one of the many Chinese dialects. Instead, they wrote the language of the monastery, Tibetan sign language, and taught scribes the assignment of various "pronunciations" of the characters. Mandarin is not Cantonese is not Han, but they all use the same "character" meaning "horse". The Tibetan sign language shapes follow the hands as they move in actually writing some of the characters. Whenever I have given an overview of Sign Writing, I have used that as an example, saying, "don't anyone ever tell you that a civilization cannot be built on a written language which is not a spoken one -- Chinese has been doing it for over 4000 years". | ||||||||||||||||||||
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