Dear List,

The 36th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society will meet
at UCB on 6-7 February 2009. Our collaborator Richard Sproat is one of
the five speakers giving plenary addresses at this conference.

Other featured speakers are the phonologist John J. McCarthy, Peter
Daniels (coeditor of _The World's Writing Systems_), Lyle Campbell
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyle_Campbell
>), and Jean-Marie Hombert, of CNRS (<http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/37.htm.).

Richard just sent me his abstract, entitled "Some Common
Misconceptions about Writing Systems and Symbol Systems." It deals in
part with what we have learned about early writing from studies of
nonlinguistic symbols in the Indus civilization (in the so-called
Indus script).

(Many people still don't understand that our collaborative work on the
so-called script, which began in 2003, has implications that reach far
beyond ancient India. That topic is taken further in the paper we gave
at the Kyoto conference on the Indus Valley late this past May. We
plan to send that off to the press by the end of the month.)

Here is a link to the Berkeley conference:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/index.html

The final program hasn't yet been printed, but Richard writes that it
appears that he will "have the first plenary slot, from 10:45 to 11:45
on Saturday February 5."

I'll be going up to meet with Richard at the Conference, and I'll give
more precise directions before the meeting. I expect that others from
the List will also attend.

Here is Richard's full abstract:

> Some Common Misconceptions about Writing Systems and Symbol Systems
>
> Richard Sproat
> Oregon Health & Science University
>
> In this talk I will discuss some common and persistent misconceptions
> about writing systems and symbol systems.
>
> The first misconception is that non-trivial symbol systems that seem
> to exhibit structure in their "messages" must be (linguistic) writing
> systems, since structure is a property of language. This misconception
> is at the core of recent claims that the Indus Valley symbols must
> have been writing: The system clearly shows what appears to be
> syntactic structure, so it surely must represent language. I show
> that some obviously non-linguistic symbol systems also show quite rich
> structure. Hence the demonstration of structure in a system tells us
> absolutely nothing about its function.
>
> The second misconception is that syllabaries are somehow more
> "natural" than segmental writing systems, because they directly encode
> syllables, which are themselves more intuitive phonological units than
> segments. The implication is that syllabaries require little
> abstraction on the part of users, something that I argue ignores how
> syllabaries typically work in practice.
>
> The third misconception is that Chinese writing is logographic. If
> this claim is to be taken at face value, it means that Chinese writing
> represents an arbitrary mapping between symbols and words (or
> morphemes). This is surely true of part of the system. But as
> DeFrancis and others have argued, it misses the point that a major
> portion of the Chinese writing system is based on phonology. Nor is
> this a mere taxonomic quibble: the phonological component of Chinese
> writing can be shown to have "psychological reality".
>
> Finally, there is a common belief that if one wants to increase
> literacy in a society, it helps to make the writing system simpler.
> Commonly cited examples are Korean Hangul and Chinese character
> simplification. I will argue there is no basis for this belief.
> Indeed it is rather simple to show that while literacy rates correlate
> well with a number of socio-economic factors, the correlation between
> literacy rates and the complexity of the writing system is effectively
> zero.

Steve