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Dossier
1. Introduction

On Scripturology

Jean-Marie Klinkenberg et Stéphane Polis
p. 57-102
Traduction(s) :
De la scripturologie [fr]

Notes de la rédaction

Because of the numerous hieroglyphic signs included as images in the contribution, a full-text version of this paper is not available online, but it can be downloaded in PDF format.

Notes de l’auteur

This paper is a translation by Todd J. Gillen of the original French contribution ‘De la scripturologie’ published in the same issue of Signata (pp. 9-56). We are very grateful to Todd for his hard work on this terminologically and conceptually demanding paper; all remaining issues and inconsistencies are ours.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Similarly, see Harris (2000, 16): “The rethinking of writing that was already needed in Saussure’s (...)
  • 2 This observation is shared (in particular in the domain of semiotics) and the acts of (re-)founding (...)
  • 3 Cf. Klinkenberg (this volume) with a detailed commentary on the different components of the definit (...)

1In this contribution we present the principles and parameters of a discipline which remains—in our intended meaning1—largely yet to be established:2 scripturology. This discipline concerns the study of different facets of writing, perceived in its generality, as the semiotic apparatus articulating language facts and spatial facts. We refer at the outset to the definition proposed in this volume: “script is a pluricode apparatus having a general usage within a situated human community; its plane of expression is constituted of discrete, combinable units, whose substance can be visual, tactile, or acoustic (but at any rate organised spatially), and its plane of content comprises, among others, combinable linguistic units; these two planes are matched according to socialised rules such that, as much in the reception and the interpretation as much as in the encoding and the production, systematic correlations—stable and intersubjective—can be observed between them.”3

  • 4 The appellation ‘graphemology’ would surely be too restrictive (to the extent that scripturology go (...)

2The term retained for designating this domain of study is a blended compound, forged from the Latin deverbal noun scriptura (which refers both to the ‘written thing’ and to the ‘composition’) and from the Greek suffix -logie (which performatively establishes the scientific character of the field); this designation indexes, in some way, the hybrid and heterogeneous character of the domain of study4 that we bring together and unify under this banner.

3This unification comes about first in the point of view adopted. Scripturology is understood as a general theory targeting the establishment of a semiotic typology of writing systems. Its horizon is therefore comparable, within the study of writing, to that of linguistic typology. In order to specify the contours and objectives of such a discipline and to situate our approach, the analogy with the typology of languages will serve us here as an heuristic method.

  • 5 See nevertheless Heath (2016, p. 487), who highlights that this remained among the goals of J. Gree (...)
  • 6 Sampson (2015, p. 42): “scripts which have evolved over long periods as the everyday writing system (...)
  • 7 An influential typology, resting on the debatable primacy (even universality) of the syllable, is c (...)
  • 8 Sampson (2016, p. 562): “The idea that a logographic script might be a fully-fledged, entirely sati (...)
  • 9 On these different points, see Kim (this volume).
  • 10 See the chapter of Harris (2000, pp. 1-16) entitled ‘Writing and civilization’ for a historic panor (...)
  • 11 See, among others, the critique of Daniels (1990).
  • 12 See Joyce & Borgwall (2013) for a practical overview of current classifications for systems of writ (...)

4Just as linguistic typology has distanced itself from the classification of the diversity of languages of the world5 into major types—analytic, agglutinative, fusional—, it is hardly defensible today to envisage the typology of scripts as a mere classification of the variety of writing systems into large categories such as ‘pictographic’, ‘logographic’, ‘syllabic’, or ‘alphabetic’ (see already Taylor, 1883). These types are often descriptively mismatched,6 since they raise to the rank of systems individual functions of constitutive units, and thus do not take account of the necessarily composite character of systems strictly speaking (we shall come back to this issue in §3 below). In addition, these typologies7 are generally found paired, consciously or otherwise, with a teleological perspective that envisages writing systems as attempts more or less resulting in or approximations more or less successful in the aim of achieving the alphabetic ideal (Sampson, 2016),8 according to a fantasized evolutionary continuum (Battestini, 1997, pp. 34-36) that is regularly stained with ethnocentrism9 (Yan, 2002). We would easily leave with Hegel the sad judgement that “the alphabetic script is in it and for it the most intelligent” (apud Derrida 1967, p. 11) if this position wasn’t still a concern in myriad contexts.10 Take for example the influential publication of Gelb (1952), which presents the alphabet as the culmination of the evolution of writing systems of the world,11 or the essay of Goody & Watt (1963), who reserve the characterisation ‘literate societies’ for those societies which use alphabetic script (thus excluding those which, like Chinese, have not been able to take advantage, for millennia, of the blessings of this literacy). Contributions of this kind have had (and continue to have) a profound and unsettling impact on the entire discipline (Cole & Cole, 2006, p. 305). Scripturology thus does not take as an objective the classification12 of systems of writing in large sets based on unique and necessarily simplistic criteria.

  • 13 See, for example, Coulmas (2002, p. 151): “[a]ll writing systems incorporate linguistic analysis, a (...)
  • 14 See Justeson (1976) and Klinkenberg (2005), who suggests hierarchical implications of the type: “to (...)
  • 15 He identifies six types, and certain among them can be furnished with the prefix morpho-, which cor (...)
  • 16 We refer to the debates with Sampson (1994, 2015).
  • 17 A universal such as that presented by Daniels (2017, 2018) of (mono-)syllabic origins for writing i (...)

5To continue with the analogy with language typology, scripturology could then be seen as a search for the universals of writing, as with the language universals researched by Greenberg (e.g., 1963) and his school. If the identification of universals13 (in particular—but not only—implicational universals14) indeed forms part of the field of scripturology, then it is important that we should identify their nature. DeFrancis (1989), a specialist in Chinese script, put forward the thesis in his work Visible Speech: the Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems according to which all scripts are ultimately subject to a single principle, phonography.15 This is not the place to refute this thesis,16 though it is important to note that such a generalisation is either reductive (i.e., scripts do not reduce to this one principle), or trivial (asserting the relations between writing and second articulation of language which is a matter of definition). In other words, if we are on a search for universals, they should be situated on another level of generality.17

6In this sense, a motto very current in language typology is ‘what’s where, and why?’ (Bickel, 2007). This question of knowing what we find, where, and why? represents a provisional departure from the universalist perspective postulated by the ‘what’s possible?’ in favour of an approach aiming to describe and understand linguistic diversity, in being interested in features more or less widely distributed among the languages of the world. The World Atlas of Language Structure (Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013), which aims at collecting and comparing the structural properties (phonological, grammatical, and lexical) of languages, is a famous example of this orientation. To pick up from Planck (2016, p. 463), the objectives of typology become then “(i) to chart linguistic diversity and (ii) to seek out order or even unity in diversity and to make sense of it.” We hold that these two objectives can be transposed to the study of scripts and that only a solid semiotic apparatus will permit us to meet them.

1. Classifying and ordering the diversity

1.1. The plurality of expression planes: one stimulus, three signifiers

1.1.1. The grapheme

1.1.2. The grammeme

1.1.3. The scripteme

1.2. The diversity of content planes

1.2.1. The graphemic functions

1.2.2. The grammemic functions

1.2.3. The scriptemic functions

1.3. Syntagmatic relations: Scriptural field, chronosyntax and toposyntax

1.3.1. Syntax and synousia

1.3.2. Chronosyntaxes and toposyntaxes

1.4. Multiplicity of scriptural semiosis and unity of the field of scripturology

2. Support, scriptural field, and modes of writing

3. The grapheme and graphemic functions

3.1. Writing as analysis of language and of the world

3.1.1. The meta-glossic functions: categorisation by classifiers

3.1.2. The meta-graphemic functions: phonetic complements and other regulator graphemes

3.2. Towards a typology of graphemic functions

3.2.1. Syntagmatics of graphemes

3.2.2. Motivation and iconicity

4. The grammeme and grammemic functions

4.1. The role of free variation: from constituents to formats

4.2. The functions of grammemes

4.2.1. Symbolic functions

4.2.2. Indicial functions

4.2.3. Iconic functions

5. The scripteme and scriptemic functions

5.1. The index: generalities

5.2. The index in scripturology

5.3. Typology of scriptemic indexical relations

5.3.1. Syntax of indexation

5.3.2. Variables of indexation

5.4. The acts of writing: pragmatic functions of scriptemes

6. Conclusions

7We opened this essay with a heuristic analogy with language typology, and it is perhaps useful to come back to it in the conclusion in order to specify how the point of view of scripturology permits us to escape the pessimistic opinion of Sampson (2015, p. 566)—according to which “relative to other branches of linguistics, for the study of writing systems issues of typology are unusually contentious, unusually significant, and also unusually difficult to research. That combination is perhaps unfortunate. But it is the way things are”—and to reconsider two big questions posed at the beginning.

  • Scripturology does not imply the renunciation of a classification perspective, but rather invites us to avoid simplification of categories based on unique principles and evade arborescent typologies, as reasonable as they may be (e.g., Haas, 1976; Sampson 2015, pp. 20-26). Any system of writing possesses necessarily two sub-sets of features, the first arising from its spatial nature and the second resulting from its relationship with language. With that established, the classificatory approach would benefit from combining the qualitative and the quantitative: what graphemic (§3.2.), grammemic (§4.2.) and scriptemic (§5) functions are possible and actualized in the different writing systems of the world? what are the syntagmatic possibilities at these different levels? and what is their distribution? These actualizations and distributions indeed determine the types of analysis of language and experience (§3.1.) performed by individual writing systems.

  • Neither does scripturology renounce research into generalisations or the quest for universals. On the contrary, it elicits them, but with fresh insight. Diverging from tautology (DeFrancis, 1989) or disputable principles (like the (mono-)syllabic hypothesis of Daniels, 2018), it allows us to envision questions such as: do all the graphemes possessing a classifying function also have a demarcative syntactic value? Does every system of writing possessing phonemograms also have graphemes functioning as phonetic complements? One could of course multiply the inquiries of this kind and extend them to the domains of the grammemes and scriptemes.

8But a proper response to these questions is not simple, since it implies first of all a return towards the empirical material with a lens informed to a greater or lesser extent by the theoretical apparatus sketched here. It is, we hope, to clarify these questions that the present volume can contribute.

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Notes

1 Similarly, see Harris (2000, 16): “The rethinking of writing that was already needed in Saussure’s day still remains to be done.”

2 This observation is shared (in particular in the domain of semiotics) and the acts of (re-)founding have proliferated (among others Gelb, 1952; Derrida, 1967; Harris, 1993 & 2000; and Klock-Fontanille 2016a).

3 Cf. Klinkenberg (this volume) with a detailed commentary on the different components of the definition. Certain borderline cases, like the writing of sign languages, are discussed this issue (cf. Boutet et al., this volume).

4 The appellation ‘graphemology’ would surely be too restrictive (to the extent that scripturology goes far beyond the study of graphemes alone; the same observation applies to Daniels’ (2018) ‘graphonomy’ (cf. §2 below), and ‘graphology’ is obviously unavailable. The designation ‘grammatology’ is probably too charged with connotations inherited from Gelb (1952) and Derrida (1967). We are left with ‘scripturology’, even though the term is already used by medievalists to refer to the discipline occupied with the evolution and structures of medieval orthographic systems (the science of scripta, cf. Gossen, 1979), and by the communication sciences in the study of ‘scripts’.

5 See nevertheless Heath (2016, p. 487), who highlights that this remained among the goals of J. Greenberg and that these morphological types have sometimes been replaced by other general criteria, such as the opposition OV vs. VO (Lehmann, 1973), ‘head’ vs. ‘dependent-marking’ (Nichols, 1986), or languages with ergative vs. non-ergative syntax (Dixon, 1979).

6 Sampson (2015, p. 42): “scripts which have evolved over long periods as the everyday writing systems of whole speech-communities or nations are almost always something of a mixture.” We refer here to the classification of scripts on a continuum between pure phonography and pure logography proposed by DeFrancis & Unger (1994) and Unger & DeFrancis (1995).

7 An influential typology, resting on the debatable primacy (even universality) of the syllable, is currently that of Daniels (e.g., 2017, 2018), who proposes a classification in five types: (1) logo-syllabic, (2) syllabic, (3) abjad, (4) alphabet, (5) abugida.

8 Sampson (2016, p. 562): “The idea that a logographic script might be a fully-fledged, entirely satisfactory mode of written communication scarcely entered the purview of these scholars.”

9 On these different points, see Kim (this volume).

10 See the chapter of Harris (2000, pp. 1-16) entitled ‘Writing and civilization’ for a historic panorama and critique of these questions.

11 See, among others, the critique of Daniels (1990).

12 See Joyce & Borgwall (2013) for a practical overview of current classifications for systems of writing.

13 See, for example, Coulmas (2002, p. 151): “[a]ll writing systems incorporate linguistic analysis, and all writing systems are linear.”

14 See Justeson (1976) and Klinkenberg (2005), who suggests hierarchical implications of the type: “tout signe [scriptural] à fonction intonative a également une valeur démarcative” or “tout signe à fonction thématique a également une valeur démarcative”.

15 He identifies six types, and certain among them can be furnished with the prefix morpho-, which corresponds paradoxically with a reintroduction of the logographic.

16 We refer to the debates with Sampson (1994, 2015).

17 A universal such as that presented by Daniels (2017, 2018) of (mono-)syllabic origins for writing is, to say the least, debatable.

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Jean-Marie Klinkenberg et Stéphane Polis, « On Scripturology »Signata [En ligne], 9 | 2018, mis en ligne le 17 décembre 2018, consulté le 28 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/signata/1885 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/signata.1885

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Auteurs

Jean-Marie Klinkenberg

Jean-Marie Klinkenberg is Emeritus Professor at the University of Liège (Belgium), where he held the chair of Semiotics and Rhetorics. His research covers many fields of language sciences, about which he published nearly 700 works, translated into twenty languages. He renewed the study of rhetoric within the interdisciplinary team known as Groupe μ—the collective author of A General Rhetoric (1970) and several works in visual semiotics (including A Treaty of Visual Signs, 1992), who contributed more recently to give semiotics a more cognitive and social orientation (Principia Semotica, 2015). Chairman of Signata, Klinkenberg presided the International Association for Visual Semiotics four times and represents Belgium at the advisory board of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. He is also specialized in sociolinguistics, and held numerous visiting professorships on the five continents. He has received honorary doctorates from several universities and is a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium.
Email: jm.klinkenberg[at]uliege.be

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Stéphane Polis

Stéphane Polis is Research Associate at the National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium). His fields of research include Ancient Egyptian linguistics, Late Egyptian philology and the ancient Egyptian scripts. His work focuses specifically on language variation and language change in Ancient Egyptian – Coptic, and on the publication and analysis of hieratic material from the community of Deir el-Medina. He supervises the development of the Ramses Project at the University of Liège with Jean Winand (http://ramses.ulg.ac.be), and of the Thot Sign-List (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanity & University of Liège), and coordinates the semantic maps project Le Diasema with Thanasis Georgakopoulos (http://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/lediasema/).
Email: s.polis[at]uliege.be

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