Does your theory that writing representing some spoken language include deaf people who have never experienced sound in their life? They can use the usual writing systems, and they can also develop their own full-fledged writing systems. Sign languages don't have sound for obvious reasons. Besides, their grammar/vocabulary/whatever are different from spoken language. So if they've never heard or experienced a spoken language, what's the corresponding spoken language for people with hearing impairments?

Last edited by magamo (2009 December 02, 2:31 pm)

icecream wrote:

writing reflects speech because thats how it's most useful, rather than by necessity

I think that it's worth maintaining the distinction between 'writing system' (which to me by definition means 'a means of writing down language') and other sorts of symbolic communication system, because the idea of being able to write down speech seems to be conceptually far from obvious, since it seems to have been independently invented only three or four times ever.

Can I back up a bit? I'm still fascinated, curious about creative uses of kanji. I think these different things were kind of mixed together earlier and I wasn't sure what was being said:

    old kanji forms  vs  new forms
    kanji & kana    vs    all kana
    script as meaning   vs  script as social status

Aijin wrote:

However, once you focus on literature, kanji forms present an extra dimension to nuance of expression in writing.

Y wrote:

I've seen this claim a lot, but I've never seen it supported by actual quotations from literature that show kanji presenting extra nuance that would not be conveyed if kana were used instead.  I think the claim is especially suspect because when you look at authors like Soseki and Akutagawa, modern editions make many changes in their kanji usage to conform to contemporary style.

Was this about kanji forms or kanji vs kana?  Do changes in modern editions rule out the possibility that some changes weren't made in order to preserve literary intent? Are such literary devices ever footnoted (as they do for translations)?

Y - Are you saying that script variation as a literary device isn't significant enough to be a reason for keeping kanji, or that such creative use doesn't exist at all? The reason I'm surprised is that I recall learning about different types of wordplay at school, but I never read literature beyond school and don't have a sense for how common or rare it is. I'm pretty sure it exists though.

magamo wrote:

Does your theory that writing representing some spoken language include deaf people who have never experienced sound in their life? They can use the usual writing systems, and they can also develop their own full-fledged writing systems. Sign languages don't have sound for obvious reasons. Besides, their grammar/vocabulary/whatever are different from spoken language. So if they've never heard or experienced a spoken language, what's the corresponding spoken language for people with hearing impairments?

When speaking of deaf people in linguistic contexts, sign languages are equivalent to spoken languages -- it's been shown that they are acquired in the same way as spoken languages.  However, I believe I have read that people who are truly 100% deaf from birth (a comparatively rare condition) have trouble learning to read, compared even to children who go deaf at age 1-2 or so, when they've already been exposed to a lot of spoken language and presumably begun the acquisition phase.

thora wrote:

Y - Are you saying that script variation as a literary device isn't significant enough to be a reason for keeping kanji, or that such creative use doesn't exist at all?

The former I definitely agree with -- for the latter, I wouldn't say that it doesn't exist at all, but in my experience it is not used very often (if at all) by most writers.

However, this conversation is veering into abolition of kanji; I wasn't really talking about that, I was just trying to make the point that reforming a writing system and reforming language are two different things.  Trying to get rid of katakana and write loan words in hiragana would be a fundamentally different (and much easier) task than trying to rid the Japanese language of Western loan words.  This is because (most) people have to consciously learn to read, so it's (comparatively) easy to affect the written language by government policies affecting both publishing and the educational system.  This is not true of spoken language.  I'm not saying that Japan should get rid of katakana, just that if they wanted to, that would be a lot easier than getting rid of loan words.

Look at China -- the simplified character reform was enacted fairly quickly and is basically complete at this point (and has been for a while), but the initiative to make putonghua the national standard speech has essentially not worked (it's had some effect, but nothing like the success of the simplified characters).

Now, it's possible that writing reforms would have some effect on the language -- if katakana were abolished and loan words were written in hiragana, it's possible that the use of loan words in writing would decrease.  Maybe, maybe not.  By the same token, I think it's fairly certain that if kanji were abolished, the use of rare Chinese loan words in writing would probably decrease as well.  As to whether this is a good or bad thing, my personal opinion is that it's a good thing -- I guess what I don't understand about the "expression" argument is that if it's good to have more and more characters for greater expression, why not add even more?  Write Japanese with a combination of kanji, kana, katakana, hangul, romaji, the thai alphabet, and whatever other symbols you want, each one adding an additional layer of meaning and connotation?  There's nothing magical about the kanji+hiragana+katakana combination.

ruiner wrote:

For me, and I think for many others and many more in the future, writing is as much a part of language as speech.

This is impossible.  If you are a non-deaf native speaker, you almost certainly mastered your native language in spoken form before you learned to read.  You may use writing in your daily life more than speech (although this is uncommon), but the writing you use is still coming from the spoken language you acquired as a child.  No (non-deaf non-mute) native speaker of any language requires writing or a writing system to communicate in their native language. 

The rest of your post is almost incomprehensible to me, sorry.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2009 December 02, 6:46 pm)

yudantaiteki wrote:

ruiner wrote:

For me, and I think for many others and many more in the future, writing is as much a part of language as speech.

This is impossible.  If you are a non-deaf native speaker, you almost certainly mastered your native language in spoken form before you learned to read.  You may use writing in your daily life more than speech (although this is uncommon), but the writing you use is still coming from the spoken language you acquired as a child.  No (non-deaf non-mute) native speaker of any language requires writing or a writing system to communicate in their native language. 

The rest of your post is almost incomprehensible to me, sorry.

Ah well, your preconceptions seem firmly ingrained as impossibilities, so I guess my comment's comprehension matters little.

I'm baffled by your view of writing. I was actually 'speechless' when I read 'This is impossible, etc...'

Um, let's see... speech is a particular generation of sound via the human body, an articulation of the various structures and elements we call 'language'. We're, obviously, born with the physical toolkit to communicate with this medium, 'from the womb', as it were, no tools necessary. So yes, historically and individually until we begin learning the writing system, we're relying on 'speech' for language, even if what we're learning is actually comprised of elements that arise from writing as well as speech, amongst other unquantifiable things. But then we (rather quickly and progressively more easily, methinks) technologize this process of language-learning with writing, enhancing our learning of the language in tandem in complementary mediums. That's not even going into multimedia. Personally, I view it better to simply bypass the notion of 'speech' as this middleman that has some of us convinced they're the 'man', and look at 'sound', mapping it into 'visuals' and 'space' in order to generate language, creating a kind of tactile, audiovisual, abstractly layered gestalt.

Speech certainly lends a narrow range of the aural spectrum to writing and is useful at first, but that's all it 'needs' to contribute, the rest writing can gather from other areas, and likewise writing's aural spectrum is in my experience far more nuanced and complex than anything speech can physicalize. Regardless, it's all a set of interactions of brain and environment. It's not difficult to see that simply because a system incorporates, in varying amounts, other senses, that doesn't make the system secondary, perpetually subordinate to whatever constrained aspect of a major sense happens to be primarily used to communicate before giving rise to something new. Think of it as more of a synthesis, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Frankly, while speech as a kind of pale shadow of writing is useful for communication in literate cultures and obviously in oral ones (wherever they are), I think it's inefficient and too limited to be anything but a lowest common denominator tool, secondary to the multimodal superiority of writing, or to a direct, structured sensorium of senses themselves. ^_^ Perhaps a subwriting system can be reserved for it, but then this gets into that cryptic quack nest0r's incomprehensible comments in this thread: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=45143

Apologies if it seems as if I'm 'attacking' you with these lengthy comments, they're more like broadcasts I write mostly for my own benefit, writing them with that sense of publication forces me to structure thoughts I don't usually bother making explicit to myself.

Last edited by ruiner (2009 December 02, 7:26 pm)

yudantaiteki wrote:

What sort of elements in language "arise from writing"?  How do languages that have no writing system deal with these elements, or are they simply inferior?  Is it impossible for an illiterate person to communicate with these elements?  If not, then what real connection do they have to writing?

Note that something can affect language without being part of language.  The printing press, the Internet, radio, and television are all examples of things that have affected language in major ways, but nobody would say that they are language.

I don't really consider the primacy of speech to be a "preconception"; it's a fundamental principle of modern linguistics.

And once again, none of this really gets at the basic point I was trying to make that changing a writing system is different (and easier) than changing language.  The latter is not impossible, but it cannot be done as quickly or on as large a scale as the former.  This is predictable from linguistic theory and can be seen in actual situations where both have been tried.

I'm afraid I'll have to burst the phonocentric linguistic bubble you're in and declare that writing has primacy in language. Others have also at the least pointed out that privileging sound over other senses for the reasons I outlined in an above comment is rather silly an arbitration. Try Google for your references, elementary logic and intuition should help with the rest. Writing encompasses much more complexity of thought to be communicated, through its spatiotemporal flexibility and multimodality. If it makes you feel better, you can think of speech as a specialization of sound that supplements text on some occasions.

Language is not some fixed, separate thing. It's an emergent phenomenon used to communicate its contents based on what is available to/from the brain and environment as part of a distributed, dynamic system. In that sense, the printing press, the eyes, the ears, the tongue, ink, a keyboard, whatever, you can think of those as part of the language, in the same way that the physical material of CNS is a part of consciousness, though I hope one would take a more detailed and abstracted look at it than that. I emphasize 'consciousness' in hopes you won't interpret 'emergent' to be 'passive'.

As I mentioned before, writing and the continuing evolution of culture and technology does indeed make language more modifiable, enhances it, but how will you view this aspect of writing? Rather than isolating it, reducing it, and attempting to enforce some kind of top-down change through it according to various arbitary standards/measurements/goals and calling it reform, why not look at usage, people, culture, function, see how to optimize it according to more nuanced, dynamic understanding? Encourage that kind of thought for the democratizing of communication rather than continue on the same old path.

Slight tangent: I'm disappointed to see that apparently Walter Ong had a bias towards orality too? Too bad, with his somewhat dated but enjoyable theoretical insights into the impact of writing on the mind and culture, I had hoped to consider him kin. Ah well.

Last edited by ruiner (2009 December 03, 7:01 pm)

leosmith wrote:

ラストスパート Fail.

Rust spot? Those are quite troublesome. I generally use a silver sponge thingy to remove, depending on the surface.

Last edited by nest0r (2009 December 03, 7:42 pm)

yudantaiteki wrote:

ruiner wrote:

I'm afraid I'll have to burst the phonocentric linguistic bubble you're in and declare that writing has primacy in language. Others have also at the least pointed out that privileging sound over other senses for the reasons I outlined in an above comment is rather silly an arbitration. Try Google for your references, elementary logic and intuition should help with the rest. Writing encompasses much more complexity of thought to be communicated, through its spatiotemporal flexibility and multimodality. If it makes you feel better, you can think of speech as a specialization of sound that supplements text on some occasions.

How is it possible for writing to have primacy in language, when speech existed before writing, many languages have no writing system, and there are many illiterate people who can speak but not read or write?  What does it mean to you for writing to have primacy?

Speech is a relatively simple, easy supplemental linguistic medium for the more flexible, technologized multimedia communications we've developed, and in a secondary way continues to inform it for now, though to indulge in transhumanist speculation: I hope folks will continue to develop their phonological processing in working memory and suchlike until we can augment (Misaki-chan!) or even replace physical speech as the aural source for writing's multimodality, instead using representations of more nuanced aural textures in reading/writing, for example, I'm reminded of how studies in Reading Japanese Cool discuss how some prefer manga to anime adaptations because what they subvocalize is 'better' to them than what's voiced on TV. My own preferences take this much more neurotically further, but I'm discursively speculating now [always]... ;p - Point being, I think for various reasons the 'subvocal' naturally reaches past the speech middleman towards 'subaural', this reaching out entails recruiting aural memory and I think could be embraced and taken further. Other examples are conceptions of pauses and silence in poetry (feel free to ignore this particular bit if you don't immediately intuit what I'm saying), or subjective abstracted appreciation of the voice as an instrument, protean and extensible via digital tools.

Likewise though I'm still building my personal models of this in conjunction with what other thinkers have made their life's work in researching, I take a fluid view on functional/anatomical modularity and unity in the brain with regards to cognitive linguistics (or interactions of domain-specific/domain-general processing and how implicit/explicit, short/long term memory interacts in conjunction with working memory/global neuronal workspace paradigms [related to functionalist, emergent notions of consciousness]).

I likewise optimistically take a proactive view of embodied cognition and the possibilities of what--to choose one model amongst many but this is recent and cognitive so I'll use it--Dehaene calls in his new book The Reading Brain "neuronal recycling" (such as with the visual cerebral modules and reading) over time, as cultural evolution takes place so much more quickly than biological (perhaps here think of conceptual blending, metaphors , memes or whathaveyou).

At any rate, once a person, culture, &c. develops literacy, I say it's time to put speech in its proper place as being historically originary medium-wise, but not so much in modern times since we're also incorporating literate abstractions of language concepts or simply ideas transmitted and formed in writing, even in what we learn orally before proceeding [with new tools/methods I feel increasingly earlier/easier]) to become literate.

Thus yes, speech over our past evolution affected how we shaped various cognitive processes to carry information, but is now outgrown by new offspring, even if speech remains as a continuing, limited/specialised supplemental medium.

Writing is (I actually view this as dependent upon prevailing conceptions but for rhetorical, counterbalancing flourish speak in terms of absolutes) the dominant matrix in literate cultures, and ought to be for others in its full potential, and I think we all have the capacity to do so, allowing for universal and unique and adaptive language, and ideas like phonocentric/alphabetic simplifications as 'reform' (implying improvement rather than change) I think are unnecessary and Sisphyean/Pyrrhic in the long term and engendered by a self-fulfilling mindset; for int'l communication and oral cultures I think something along the lines of what, ah, nest0r outlined in the above linked thread 'atlas of endangered languages' is more viable.

Apologies, this went from a generalized, playfully argumentative broadcast to an edited-on-the-fly brainstorming session.

Also, to put it in my philosophizing about Japanese, at present I love the feedback loop of kanji/words with regards to semantic resonance or nuance--however subjective and labile, sounds and meanings of words dependent upon collocation and situational context, often emphasized or artistically altered (?) by superscript, the visual/spatial/tactile processing of the script in a kind of layered fashion (from what I've read about rereading, visual decoding/skimming, psycholinguistic studies, ocular variations of backlooping), and while you can find different aspects (people who know more about the language such as yourself) to criticize and improve (perhaps discussing gender taxonomies or age-graded systems), and I think that essay I linked about 'katakanafication' before is exemplary, I really think merely pointing out the way the system works and the troubles it causes or merits it brings from a variety of perspectives, speaking not just of what 'is', from within/without various contexts, but what 'can be' or 'ought to be', until usage changes from the sides and bottom to influence the 'top', I think that's better. And with that, my latest incomprehensibility is complete.

While I'm in the mood: As for deafness and literacy, I'd say it's related to the absence of the aural domain, obviously, because much of writing as it stands encompasses that domain, but once you remove the fixation on 'speech' representation with the alphabet than you could more easily compensate and translate the broader aural permutations of writing into textural, sculptural constructions alongside the visual representation, rather than a temporal focus that's ever falling short of the missing aurality.

Here's an obliquely related study on deafness/kanji: Deaf Signers Who Know Japanese Remember Words and Numbers More Effectively Than Deaf Signers Who Know English

Last edited by ruiner (2009 December 03, 11:57 pm)

I found a good example illustrating how the use of older kanji makes things harder:

http://jclab.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/t … iro-kajii/

廻轉: 回転
醫療:医療
絲:糸
變: 変
乘物: 乗り物?
鉢卷: 鉢巻

You can guess most things but it takes time and you end up having to learn twice the amount of characters. Plus, it makes things harder to look up.

ruiner: Maybe you should start a blog...

pm215 wrote:

Transparent_Aluminium wrote:

I found a good example illustrating how the use of older kanji makes things harder:

http://jclab.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/t … iro-kajii/

The historical kana usage (花屋があつた,  思ひ, etc) doesn't help much either. On the other hand this is in some sense the flip side of the argument that runs "this piece of all-kana text is hard to read, therefore kanji are important for reading comprehension". In both cases I think a lot of the difficulty is simply down to not being used to reading text written in that manner...

Indeed, a matter best left to organic negotiation of usage, in my opinion.

The rejection of the argument for retaining kanji for comprehension because 'all you have to do' is add spaces, and make other changes reminds me of this quote from Jun Yamada on a similar topic in the '70s: "If pigs had feathers, and wings, and claws, and walked on 2 feet, etc., then there would be no difference between pigs and chickens."

Last edited by nest0r (2009 December 07, 5:28 pm)

pm215 wrote:

To be clear, I'm certainly glad that negotiation of usage (organic or otherwise) gave us the post-WW2 kana and kanji reforms ;-)

Meh, it could've gone better. I'm more interested in how present metalinguistic awareness will inform future evolution of linguistic usage. Or something. ;p

http://www.umeboshi-yokocho.com/enikki/?p=3 is the explanation I've heard. As you might expect with slang, guessing the exact origin is kind of tricky.

and why it is combined with the hand?
batsuide: divorce

You're misreading it -- that is katakana 'chi': チ not kanji 手 'te' meaning 'hand'. So 'batsuichi' : 'one cross'.