Re: why space opera won't fly (long)

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:17:42 +0100, Catja Pafort
<green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

Brian M. Scott wrote:

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:24:05 +0100, Catja Pafort
<green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

Brian M. Scott wrote:

And a written language that uses one-concept-per-symbol
(somewhere in the back of my brain I keep a word for what
it's called, but it's a concept that shily hides right
now) is still relevant?

There isn't any such writing system. Writing systems
represent *words*, not concepts.

Words aren't concepts?

My point is that the sequence of symbols consisting of 'S'
followed by 'U' followed by 'N' represents very specifically
the English word <sun>, not any synonym thereof, either in
English or in any other language. If it represented the
concept 'sun' rather than the word <sun>, <Die sun scheint>
would be perfectly correct German, and <The massive body
around which the earth revolves is shining> would literally
the *same* sentence as <The sun is shining>; but neither of
these is actually the case.

I've felt that precisely _because_ there's more than one
word going with a character it probably refers to
something that someone who knows the language as
instinctively as a Welsh speaker translates 'glas' into
'blue' or 'green'; which makes what it stands for a
_thisness_ that gets variously translated into different
words.

Welsh <glas> is simply a sequence of four letters; when
spoken, it's a sequence of four phonemes. It's a name for a
color, but it isn't itself a color. And as you say, it
happens to represents a concept that has no exact one-word
English equivalent.

[...]

If I understand wikipedia correctly (IANAL and don't have
any specific texts at hand) logographic refers to word,

Yes: a logographic writing system is one whose individual
symbols represent whole words.

morphographic refers to morpheme (which includes prefixes
and suffixes ?)

Yes. A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning. Free
morphemes, like 'ball', can stand alone as words; bound
morphemes, which include prefixes and suffixes, cannot. A
morphographic writing system is one whose basic units
represent morphemes; many of these will also be words, of
course.

and ideographic would be a circle for 'sun' a wave for
'water', so not just representing a word in meaning, but
also in form.

Not quite. An ideographic writing system would be one that
represents ideas -- concepts -- rather than words. The
ideograms -- the symbols themselves -- don't have to be
iconic or pictorial. For instance, our everyday
Hindu-Arabic numerals ('1', '2', etc.) are ideograms. The
symbol '7' denotes a concept; depending on language, it
might be read <seven>, <sept>, <sieben>, <sem'> (Russian),
<sjau> (Old Norse), or 'fitu' (Samoan). But there's nothing
in the symbol itself to suggest seven-ness.

[...]

Our shared body-language vocabulary might be rather small
compared to spoken and written language, but that does
not mean it does not exist; and because of its formalised
nature I would distinguish it from merely point-and-grunt
communication.

So would I. But it isn't language as the term is used by
linguists.

I wonder how it could develop into one... what would it need?

The right kind of underlying structure -- basically the sort
of thing that Mary was talking about.

Brian
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Literary phonetic alphabet
    ... When a writing system is newly devised, ... be to assign one symbol to one phoneme. ... While the language is changing, however, its ... English, is that spelling was pretty much fixed by the later 17th ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: English possessive and plurals of foreign words
    ... I'd say that it is English, just written in a different writing system, but others might disagree. ... I wouldn't use lang markup for it, for reasons I've explained, even if it were spelled "George Bush". ... There are situations and contexts where some text can be said to be in language X from one perspective and in language Y in another, or even consist of parts that belong to different languages. ...
    (comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html)
  • Re: Why Chinese is so damn hard
    ... and Old English and Swedish for English ... since they had both a new writing system to get to grips ... aglutinative nature of the language was complicated. ... diphthongs but my Swedish vowels were certainly pure enough for my Swedish ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Leodhasach & Hearasch - Gaelic help please
    ... course our own traditional language is even more neglected than Gaelic is. ... who speak English soon get the gist of it. ... is someone who truly appreciates Scottish culture in that you won't find ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • the tomasites , english and the filipino
    ... And they came to teach English as part of the "policy of attraction" ... a Filipino is deemed illiterate even ... Even a secondary Spanish school like Colegio de San Juan de Letrán ... wrote a textbook to teach the English language as early as 1902. ...
    (soc.culture.filipino)