terms Phonetic and Phonemic

[Charles Butler]

It is an alphabet, in that it has a one-to-one correspondence to discrete pieces of information.  The cheremes it collects are handshapes, with markings to indicate location, movement, repetition, simultaneity, and facial expression.  Though the gestalt of a single "sign" may feel "phonemic", meaning broken down by "meaning", they are in fact "phonetic" being broken down by the use of physical space, without a grammatical overlay at first.  Movement writing writes what is there, Sign Writing adds the meaning and the context for a given language, and how it differentiates between the 500 possible handshapes and those it chooses for each language's vocabulary set, but the same could be said of the International Phonetical Alphabet which is reduced to the set of characters used by English, by Circassian, and by Xhosa, to name three contrasting languages with some sounds used only in Circassian, or Xhosa which never appear in English.
   
  Charles Butler
  

Valerie Sutton <dac at signwriting.org> wrote:
  SignWriting List
November 30, 2007

HI Everyone!

Regarding the general term "phonetic" and "phonemic"...

I would like to ask all of you on the SignWriting List....

Do you think of SignWriting as "phonetic" or "phonemic" ?

I personally like to think of SignWriting as an alphabet that can be 
written either phonetically or phonemically, depending on the writer 
and the choices they make while writing...

Technically we can write every nuance of a movement if we wish, and 
that would be more "phonetic"... more like "Movement Writing"

or as time goes by...

certain SignSpellings start to become standardized and slowly 
"phonemic" SignWriting happens too...

No matter what, SignWriting is "alphabetic", but sometimes linguists 
and scholars want to define the kind of alphabet it is...

Some say it is a "featural alphabet" and that it may be...but it is 
still an alphabet nonetheless...

And I feel it can be either phonetic or phonemic depending on the 
writer?

Am I wrong to think this?

Val ;-)



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