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From:
Joe Martin Date: Wed Oct 28, 1998 4:14 am Subject: iconicity | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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My 1.5 cents; Ferdinand De Saussure is widely acknowledged to be a founder of modern linguistics. One of his big contributions was to define the linguistic sign, which I will unpompously call an LS (normal people would say "a word." But it's confusing, cuz for us smart people on this list it can mean either a spoken word or an ASL-or-other-signed-language-Sign. Phew!). He saw this LS as a trinity--1) a meaning, 2) a symbol, 3) an *arbitrary* link between the two. The opposite of arbitrary is *iconic, meaning there is something about the symbol itself that tells you what it means. THe big deal was that human languages didn't have this iconicity; to use a standard example, there is nothing about the sound combinations "gato," "kot," "cat," or "neko," that tell you they refer to a cute little furry. Of course, in the "old days," everyone knew that sign language was just pictures in the air, iconic, not arbitrary; that's a Lot of the reason there was (is?) so much resistance to accepting it as language. Linguists had to move whole mountain ranges to get them to see arbitrariness in ASL. The focus of that discussion was on the link between meaning and LS. It really had nothing to do with writing systems. There is another arbitrary link between spoken sounds and the scribbles used to represent those sounds. Gotta be arbitrary, because the sounds are aural and the written scribbles are visual. But--and here is a cool thing to tell those cranky old linguists--since both Sign Languages and SignWriting are visual, that second arbitrary link can be avoided. This eliminates huge amounts of that mental processing load that Karen mentioned, thus making it vastly easier to learn than any other system. And I'm pretty sure ol' Ferdinand would agree with that, too. :-) Joe Martin | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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