LING 270

Language, Technology & Society

Homework for Unit 1

Handed out: Wednesday January 16, 2008

Due, in class, Monday January 28, 2008

Intro

The motivation for the homework is to drive home the point about how hard it is to come up with a writing system that makes no reference to sound.

John DeFrancis, in his Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, offers the following strong challenge to those who would propose a purely “ideographic” or “semasiographic” script:

The theory of an ideographic script must remain in the realm of popular mythology until some True Believers demonstrate its reality by accomplishing the task, say, of putting Hamlet or at least Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into English written in symbols without regard to sound.

Use your best creative powers to try to show that DeFrancis is wrong. That is, devise a system that encodes the Gettysburg Address word for word, without making any reference to the sounds of English. To keep this doable within a reasonable amount of time, you can just do the first two sentences of the Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

What you are not allowed to do

• Translate the Gettysburg Address word-for-word into another language and then just use the conventional writing system for that language.
• Scramble the words around so that, say "the" now gets written as "score" and "people" gets written as "birth".
• Provide a table containing as many entries as there are distinct words and simply do it by “table lookup” (the way that a military code might work).

These meet the criterion of not making reference to the sounds of English, but then the system becomes completely arbitrary and presumably unusable for most people.

What you are allowed to do

• Devise your own system of purely "semasiographic" or "ideographic" symbols.
• Use an existing proposal such as Blissymbolics or an extension thereof.

In either case you need to explain how the system works, and how someone might learn to use the system to write other words that are not in the set of words you already encoded.

What I am expecting to see (each of these questions is worth 5 points).

1. Your encoding of the first two sentences of the Gettysburg Address.
2. An explanation of how the system works, and how I might use your system to write words and sentences you haven’t written for the Address.
3. A succinct description of the process by which you developed and arrived at your system.
4. Your assessment of how easy or hard it would be to use such a system as opposed to a system that encoded at least some sound information. Be specific: don't just say that one is easier than the other. Give reasons and examples. Which things are easy to encode semasiographically? Which things are hard?

I am assuming that what you turn in will be up to about 5 pages in length, but you will not be graded on length, but rather on the quality of your reasoning and clarity of the presentation. Obviously for this homework there is no single right answer, so your homework cannot be “wrong”, unless you violate the principles I laid out above: you should therefore concentrate on being as creative as you can and writing as clearly as you can.