Re: VMs: Stroke harmony. Was: Has anyone been down this route before?

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

3/09/2004 12:38:45 AM, "Dennis S." <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx> wrote:


>But is this the same thing?  Each vowel is a distinct phoneme, 
>whether it is front or back.  Strokes can often stand by themselves.  
>I'm not sure the concepts are analogous.

The concepts are obviously not analogous. But the objects (be they
vowel phonemes or strokes) behave in analogous ways.


>Are Chinese and Arabic scripts relevant here?  Chinese characters 
>are conventionally analyzed into strokes for classification.  

No stroke harmony in Chinese.

>Arabic characters take on different forms depending 
>on position within words.

Quite different. Different behaviour there.
  

>So in French "graphe`me" may mean either graph, glyph, or grapheme?
In rongorongo circles. I don't know any French Mayanists.

>I thought "grapheme" was the analogue of "phoneme", 
>a set of marks on a writing surface that constitute a meaningful unit; 
Yes.

>"graph" was a single instance of a grapheme; 
Yes, but the term is unfortunate because it's long been claimed
by mathematics in a totally unrelated meaning. You just think
of "graph" as in "graph theory" or "graph" as in "graph paper".
Even I can't help thinking like that, instinctively.

>"allograph" was an alternative form of a grapheme, as B for b .  
>I'm not sure about "glyph".

English-speaking Mayanists use it. I don't know about
students of ancient manuscripts. Even Egyptologists
don't concur in their terminologies.

>Babs said it was the epigrapher's analogue for "grapheme".  

Just about.


>Yes. I've finally realized something.  
>Cryptographers treat the VMs like a cipher.  
>Linguists approach it as a language.  
>Epigraphers and other students of writing are 
>applying their own concepts.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like
a nail.



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