From: djbpitt@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David J Birnbaum)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Date: 14 Apr 92 12:34:27 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <1992Apr13.223049.38271@spss.com> markrose@spss.com 
(Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>Oh, I should have known someone would bring up ASL.  Well, that's a *damn*
>good proof that written language is primary over spoken language.

I never made a general statement that "written language is primary over
spoken language" and do not believe this to be true.  What I did state
is that there are systems of communication that can reasonably be called
human language that exist primarily in written form.  Users of these
systems might be considered bilingual or diglossic; they have spoken
language as well, but the relationship between what they write and
what they speak can be viewed as translation, rather than a secondary
(written) recoding of primary (spoken) material.  This perspective
is entirely synchronic, about which see below.

Another poster has argued convincingly that my reference to ASL is
inappropriate, not by sarcastically deriding it as "a *damn* good 
proof" of something I never said and do not believe, but by providing
specific evidence that my focus on phonation was excessively narrow.
 
>In all of these cases, so far as I know, the written language derives
>from the spoken language of an earlier time.

This is true in all cases I know of, as well, which is why my 
original comment referred to synchronic description.  In medieval
European societies where Latin was the primary written language and 
the local vernacular was the primary spoken one, the fact that Latin
may once have been primarily spoken was irrelevant.  That is, we
can discuss the grammar of medieval Latin not as the written evidence
of a spoken language, but as evidence for a language whose primary
use _at the time and for certain groups of users_ was written 
communication.  The same is true for Church Slavonic in Orthodox
Slavic culture at certain times. 

>It's quite relevant when answering the question, "What is the typical
>or prototypical example of language use?", or "What behaviors does
>linguistics need to explain?"  This particular argument does not seek
>to establish whether writing is dependent on speech.

The question we were addressing was not about typical or prototypical
examples of language use, which, in turn, is not the same as identifying
behaviors that linguists need explain.  This thread developed from
comments by some Chinese specialists that written Chinese can be
considered a separate language from spoken Chinese.  That led to a
discussion of whether there can be such a thing as a primarily
written language, so that one could speak of the morphology of
written Chinese as a separate linguistic object of study.  The question
was framed as a synchronic one from the beginning.  While the use of
a primarily written language (from a synchronic perspective) may
be atypical, the first question I would want to answer is whether
such a thing exists.  In my personal experience (with Church
Slavonic in many periods in many places in the Orthodox Slavic world) 
it does.  If so, and if we can view this written language as a
linguistic system different from its spoken counterpart within
a culture, then I do not understand why my interlocutor considers
it behavior that linguists need not explain.
 
Whether the relationship between spoken and written language 
for an individual counts merely as different registers or styles
of a single language, or as diglossia, or as bilingualism may
be difficult to determine.  But in the third case and, I think,
in the second, one might reasonably conclude that these are lin-
guistic systems whose primarily existence is written and that
qualify as proper objects of study for linguists.  The atypical
is not automatically irrelevant and ornithologists do study
penguins.

--David 
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