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From:
"Angus B. Grieve-Smith" Date: Wed Oct 28, 1998 6:01 am Subject: Re: Iconicity (was Re: Frequently-Asked Questions) | |
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Well, this cranky old (I've just been informed that I'm now in my LATE twenties) linguist would like to take a minute to crank about some of this discussion of iconicity. I usually refrain from criticizing SignWriting on the SignWriting List, but since Valerie asked the question I figured I would give an answer from my perspective. First of all, Karen Van Hoek's point about the iconicity of English letter ordering may be true (most of the time), but it's only useful in figuring out how to read and spell new words. There's a reason why we don't notice this iconicity: because we don't use it very much! Studies have shown that fluent readers, even of alphabets like English process words whole, by recognizing the shape of the whole word. In other words, once you're familiar with a word, iconicity doesn't help you at all. Second, Saussure's point about the arbitrariness of the "sign" was very useful when he said it almost a hundred years ago. But he could just as easily have said "SOME signs are arbitrary," and made his point. I'm not one of the linguists who feel that a writing system can be "too iconic." But I am concerned when people place too much importance on iconicity. The fact is that the iconic nature of SignWriting comes with a number of significant costs: 1) medium. There's a reason why this list is conducted in English using the Roman alphabet. The reason is that SignWriting messages are too much of a bother to email with most of the computers in use today. It's not impossible, but the procedural cost is too high. This is also why the SignWriting Web site uses GIF images, rather than some other encoding. Another aspect of this is that SignWriting can never be sent via TTY, the most common long-distance medium used by the Deaf in the US. Newkirk '86, and possibly some of the other systems, can be sent via TTY. 2) searchability. A friend pointed out to me that SignWriter's use of non-standardized coordinates (as well as using GIF images) means that text in SignWriting can never be indexed and searched. Unless significant changes are made to the software-internal representation of SignWriting and some system is in place for displaying them on the Web, we'll never see AltaVista in SignWriting, and you'll never be able to so much as look up a name in an address book in SignWriting. 3) size. I haven't seen SignWriting in hard copy, but one thing that strikes me on the screen is how much space it takes up compared to any other writing system I've seen. This is not a big deal, since Braille also takes up a lot of space, but it's an added drawback. I hope people don't feel attacked when I point out some of these problems. I think it's great that there's such a large group of people who care about writing signed languages, and that's the main thing. I'm just concerned that if SignWriting becomes THE system for writing, say, ASL, signers would not have all the advantages of a writing system due to the problems I mentioned above. I'm not here to cause problems, and I won't keep posting about this. I just wanted to let people know the traps that they can get into by valuing iconicity above its true worth. -Angus B. Grieve-Smith Linguistics Department The University of New Mexico |
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