The Arabic grammatical tradition

Hi,

I've been looking at what the European grammatical and linguistic tradition may have borrowed or taken from the Arabic one. If you are looking for an book and a place to start, you can try this one:

The Arabic linguistic tradition

Georges Bohas, Jean-Patrick Guillaume, Djamel Eddine Kouloughli

1990

Very interesting and informative.

Best Wishes.

A.

Indus Symbols and writing in general

I tend to think that there are a number of general problems around these Indus Symbols.

A. The first one is a number of completely oxymoronic concepts, such as the nondescript "logo-syllabic" word, which means nothing. Writing systems are either sound-based or meaning-based.That "logo-syllabic" word which tries to invent a hybrid concept is nonsense. The first obvious step is to categorize existing systems with words that make sense...

B. Another problem is the black-or-white conception of writing. There are lots of shades of gray between drawing and writing.

1. Pure drawing

2. Graphic narratives "2-D prevails over 1-D". For example: the map Lean Wolf drew of his raid for Sioux horses from Fort Berthold to Fort Buford, Dakota, along the Missouri River

3. Mnemonical scriblings "isolated symbols"; Road signs, Early cuneiform, pot-marks, possibly Vinca signs, Pre-alphabetic Touareg signs, etc. Pictish glyphs as well.

4. Defective writing "segmentally 1-D but many items (especially grammatical) missing". For example: Linear A, Late pictographic cuneiform. It cannot be read directly even though it is "worded" and means something.

5. Full-blossomed writing "not ambiguous for a competent speaker (or reader)"

- approximative: Linear B, Mayan, Cuneiform

- precise: Latin alphabet among others, Chinese

Before we try to "decipher" the Indus Symbols, we first have to understand where they stand.

Defective writing is well-attested in Mesopotamia. For example the first inscription in Hurrian lacks all grammatical morphemes. It's not even clear how it should be cut in sentences.

Before that stage, we also have plenty of Mnemonical scriblings: most (pre-)Sumerian inscriptions are of that kind. Quite surprisingly Egyptian Hieroglyphs pop out of nowhere directly to stage 5, which suggests that the whole prehistory of that system remains to be

found.

If we turn to Indus Symbols, the linear 1-D linear strings suggest that this system is at least level 3. There is a kind of symbolic encoding in that system. It seems hard to believe that they are just drawing for the sake of drawing.

What the frequency calculations show is that this system cannot be a *precise and full-blossomed* writing for sure. Indus Symbols have the profile of sound-based systems and not that of meaning-based systems. Cf. Farmer-Sproat-Witzel graph. The consequence of that is that these symbols would encode grammatical morphemes if they were a precise script, which is absurd.

Now it is possible that we can further refine the statistical analyses. A first point is that a full-blossomed writing can be approximative: it may not write vowels for example or it may lack a number of features (syllable codas, etc).The impact of these approximations on the statistical profile of scripts is unknown. What is the profile of English when written in the std spelling, when written without the vowels, when written in Linear B? This is really the basickest thing we first need to know.

At this stage, it cannot be excluded that the Indus Symbols could be a writing system with a high level of approximation. This sounds a bit improbable considering the fact that we have zero long corpora in that system.

In my opinion, the issue is to understand if the Indus Symbols are just Mnemonical scriblings or if it is a kind of Defective writing. It would be nice in fact if Statisticians would concentrate on trying to find objective criteria that enable to differentiate 3 from 4 (and approximative 5). If these symbols are a defective writing it's going to be awfully complex to tell what kind of language it encodes as the clearest indications will probably be missing. Considering all the features of the system, no long corpora, attestations on very specific artefacts, my personal point of view is that these symbols are most probably Mnemonical scriblings.

It can be noted that it took more than one thousand years in Mesopotamia to move from Level 3 to Level 5.

Moreover full-blossomed systems can also be represented in Mnemonical scriblings: Linear B is a good example of that situation.

Best Wishes.

A.

Kassite, Hurrian and Hattic

Hi,

I'm nearly through with my preliminary compilation of Kassite data.

My next target is to create a complete database which will involve Kassite, Hurrian and Hattic, and maybe Elamite as well if I can find enough material on this language.

There is a substantial probability that all these languages are closely related and that further connections can be found with Indo-European and Kartvelian.

Best Wishes

A.

PS: Let's have a thought for the on-going oil spill.

Comparing or compiling

Hi Everybody,

A crucial point about macro-comparison is data. This sounds fairly obvious. But what is the use of comparing languages when primary data are not even well-described and compiled.

For example I've been comparing Hurrian, Hattic, Kassite and Elamite. They seem more related than is usually considered. But, there's a but. There exists no lexical compilation of these languages that would enable to compare these languages. This sounds to me as a necessary first step.

The issue is not just "reaching down" or the like, but reaching too big and reaching haze.

Best wishes

A.

Linguistics

Hi there,

I've been wondering how many sorts of linguistics there are?

Maybe one can distinguish between:

- linguistics of the letter or sound, mostly (historical) phonology,

- linguistics of the word, mostly lexicography and parts of speech,

- linguistics of the sentence, that is: grammar and grammatical approaches,

- linguistics of the text, like speech acts, rhetorics and literary analysis.

I let you make up your mind.

Best Wishes

A.

Bloomfield : Leonard or Maurice

Hi whoever reads me,

Did you notice that there are two American linguists named Bloomfield?

One is Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949), the author of Language (1933) and founder of American Structuralism. The other is in fact his uncle: Maurice Bloomfield (February 23, 1855 – June 12, 1928). He was an American philologist and Sanskrit scholar.

Best Wishes

A.

Early thoughts of Bloomfield about the phoneme

Hi Everybody,

Here's something you may not know about Leonard Bloomfield's approach of the phoneme:

V. Phonemes:
15. Assumption 4. Different morphemes may be alike or partly alike as to vocal features.
Thus book : table [b]; stay : west [st]; -er (agent) : -er (comparative).
The assumption implies that the meanings are different.
16. Def. A minimum same of vocal feature is a phoneme or distinctive sound.
As for instance, English [b, s, t], the English normal word-stress, the Chinese tones.
17. The number of different phonemes in a language is a small sub-multiple of the number of forms.
18. Every form is made up wholly of phonemes.

Citation from
Bloomfield, Leonard. ‘A set of postulates for the science of language’. Language 2: 153-164, 1926
*

What is most disconcerting is that phoneme, (distinctive or vocal) feature, stress and tone are put exactly on the same level: they are the basic phonological components that combine to make up forms. It can be noted that phoneme in Bloomfield (1926) is synonymous with feature and is not yet a bundle of features belonging to a superior or different level of the description.
So
Isn't this unexpected ?



Best Wishes


A.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Dear All,

I've been reading a number of English-speaking linguists: Bloomfield, Chomsky, etc. and a number of English-speaking writers, some of whom like to self-portray as linguists or historians.
It's quite amazing how these people keep completely misunderstanding Saussure, who is and remains the best linguist so far. This would be worth a whole philological study. It seems they just cannot make a clean distinction between "langage", "langue" and "parole" and keep mixing everything up in the worst way. This is really too bad. I don't know how this problem can be addressed properly.

I'm currently reading Seuren, 1998, Western Linguistics, An historical introduction. Blackwell.
Interesting book although the title is a bit misleading. I'll try to publish a real review of that book later on when I have some time. He really "describes" Saussure in the worst possible way. Fortunately the rest is somewhat better.

Best Wishes.

A.

This is a new start

Hi Everybody !
Hope you are fine.
This is something new for me and I'll try to do my best possible.

May the 1st.
This sounds like the right time to try something new.

I'll first publish that message to see what it looks like and I'll be right back.
Hope you don't mind.

Best Wishes.

A.