Flying Bird

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 21, 2004

Sandy Fleming wrote:
> Anyway, thanks for all the help, though I'd no idea there would be so
> much
> discussion! - it's really made me think - and especially Stephan's
> illustration of 3 spellings with identical effect! A bit like "pair",
> "pare"
> and "pear" in English, I suppose  :)


Yes...those three English words sound exactly the same, but they are
spelled differently...That shows that English writing is not just based
on writing sounds...it actually changes the spelling of the same sound,
depending on the meaning of the word...

So just as English writes the same sounds in different spellings,
SignWriting can also write the exact same movements in several
different ways, as Stefan showed us...those were three different
spellings for the exact same movement...and we could add more to the
list of three, since you could also use the Finger Motion symbols we
discussed...

Right now, we do not have these spellings to mean separate things, but
who knows, maybe we will end up like English someday, having different
spellings mean different things, or...more like the German
spelling...which is more phonetically based...so that all the signs
that are produced the same way will have one spelling with several
different meanings, depending on the context of the sentence...

Val ;-)