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<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Dear typologists,</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">about a year ago, there was a discussion on whether writing is a linguistic modality of its own right, like spoken or signed modalities.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Although the majority opinion is that writing is simply a reflection of the spoken modality and not a modality by itself, I argued that written modality can be independent, based on several factors:</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">The deaf people can learn and write written languages without exposure to its spoken form;</span></li><li><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Some parts of the written modality are untranslatable to speech (such as the bullets I am using here);</span></li><li><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">There are languages that have been used almost exclusively in written form, such as Classical Chinese, which is incomprehensible when read aloud in any spoken language (other than perhaps Old Chinese).</span></li></ul>
<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">David Gil disagreed and argued that even if deaf person writes a written language, they are still in some sense communicating in a spoken language, just in its written form.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">For now, let's leave that discussion aside, and say that written modality is not an independent modality.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">The question I would like to ask is: Are there any other linguistic modalities? Or do we have only two - signed and spoken?</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">If we have only two modalities, then is it hypothetically possible to have other modalities?</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Or are the two modalities biologically ingrained in our brains, and we can only truly acquire a language in either signed or spoken form?</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">To me this seems to be a critical question regarding how we understand human language, yet to my knowledge, it has been seldom discussed. So I would appreciate your opinion on this issue.</span></div>
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From Uppsala,
<div dir="auto">Ian</div>
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