From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Date: 12 Apr 92 14:13:56 GMT
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department

In article <1992Apr10.172721.26369@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <204689@unix.cis.pitt.edu> djbpitt@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David J Birnbaum) writes:
>>Last week, in a discussion of Chinese trees and forests, a contributor
>>was mercilessly flamed for confusing orthography and morphology. Several
>>other contributors announced in no uncertain terms that speech is
>>primary and that writing is not a proper object for linguistic study.

>Who said anything of the sort?  Several people stated that speech is
>*primary* in linguistics, but I don't think anyone said writing is not 
>to be studied, or even that it is not important.

>>The reference to written Chinese as a written "language," rather than as
>>the writing system used to record a spoken language, leads me to wonder
>>whether the emphasis on the primacy of spoken language is appropriate.
>>I realize that this emphasis has been an article of faith in linguistics
>>for a good long time, 

>For good reasons.  All languages are spoken, while only a minority are
>written; you learn a spoken language before learning a written one;
>writing loses much of what goes on in speech; more speaking is done 
>than writing; writing is heavily influenced by speech; writing is
>more prestigious so speech needs a little theoretical boost.

This is not true.  Even in ancient times, there were pictographs, where
I doubt that the choice of the symbols was in any way affected by the
particular sounds used.  I have mentioned in another posting that there
are theories that writing did not originate from speech.

There are also languages which are primarily written.  The Hindu-Arabic
numeral representation are one of them, and I do not believe that the 
spoken words in any of the languages involved had much to do with the
characters.  The Greek representation of numerals used their alphabet,
augmented to 27 characters, because they needed 27 symbols, and they
had this well-known collection of 24.  I have read mathematical papers
in Russian, a language which I do not know, and I have often been abler
to deduce what is being conveyed by the formulas alone.

Now a written language is frequently "phoneticized" merely because it
is easier and faster to speak than to write.  Few people can produce
original written information faster than they can produce the information
orally, so that, for example, a mathematician or a physicist or a chemist
will used verbalizations of their widely understood symbolic means of
communication for speed and ease of communicating.  But even when the
symbols are derived mnemonically from a spoken language, the basic
communication is still written.  Reading speed > speaking speed > 
writing speed.  Notice that I have used a well-understood symbol here,
and while in this case English speakers will generally use the same
pronunciation, the symbol is not derived from any spoken language.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)  
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