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