forum SignWriting List Forum
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From:  Themis Karaminis
Date:  Thu Apr 5, 2001  4:02 pm
Subject:  Re: A misconception


>A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that terms like "phonetic"
and
>"phonology" only refer to spoken language. After all, the "phon-" of
these
>words comes from Greek--it's the Greek word for sound. Since SignWriting
>doesn't represent sounds, people think it can't be a phonetic writing
>system.

>When we say that sign language isn't phonological or phonetic, (or, like
>below, that it is so only metaphorically) we are saying that it is not
>language.

> At the same time, SignWriter shares with
>other transcription systems a structured representation of the sign,
>i.e.a sign is the combination of ("phonological" or "phonetic"- a
>metaphor from spoken language linguistics) features.
>
> It was a political decision to use the word
> "phonology" for signed languages rather than Stokoe's "cherology,"
> calculated to emphasize the similarities between spoken and signed
> languages.
>

>There is no misconception, only a
>different use of the term. In that group of linguists, using phonology
>for signed languages is a metaphor.


Dear Angus and Joe,

I would like to add some greek etymology information in the discussion for
unifying different terminology usage
-cherology comes from chera which is the greek word for hand. The term
chereme, which has also been used in the past, was constructed accordingly
to phoneme.
-metaphor comes from meta(adv.)+phero(v.)= further+carry/move= transfer.
Therefore the decision to use the term phonology to describe sign language is
etymologically, the metaphor of a term from one field to another (in
fact a very close one). Historically and politically this metaphor
reflects the prejudice against signed languages.


> The whole point of
>phonetics is that it is so low-level that you're not really dealing with
>the same thing once you get into a different modality. Because of this I
>think that "sign phonetics" (which I've never heard used) would be a
>metaphor.

I am not sure I can understand why the "inapplicability" of the term
phonetics to sign language constitutes a metaphor (linguistically).
However, the Leiden Sign Phonology Group introduces itself as " a group of
linguists at Leiden University in the Netherlands, studying the phonology
and phonetics of sign languages" in its homepage
(https://www.leidenuniv.nl/hil/sign-lang/)


Themis Karaminis,
PdP lab, School of Applied Informatics,
University of Macedonia,
Thessaloniki, Greece.

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