Chief Juan Datahan (†) in front of a chart showing Eskayan ancestors labelled in the Eskayan script.

Piers Kelly
University of New England

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the study of writing systems. Much of the new impetus has come from linguists investigating the interactions between graphic structure and linguistic structure. Yet practitioners hailing from classics, archaeology, anthropology and elsewhere are examing writing as a social as much as a linguistic phenomenon. These developments have not been universally welcomed. In his introduction to An exploration of writing (2018), Peter Daniels wrote that “area specialists seem to have abandoned questions of how writing relates to language in favor of how writing relates to society. I find this move to be premature: the comparative and typological exploration of the connections between writing and language is far from completed […]” (Daniels 2018, 5). Here I want to lend weight to Daniels’ observation that a perceptible shift in focus has been unfolding in the study of writing systems, and to agree that we are far from having exhausted traditional grapholinguistic questions. What I reject, however, is the assumption that the social realities of writing are of secondary importance to linguistic analysis, or that a synthesis cannot be imagined until we’ve sorted out the nuts and bolts of how writing systems work.

As it happens, anthropologists and archaeologists were once seriously invested in the relationship of writing to society, a relationship that was (unfortunately) theorised and systematised to support 19^th-century social evolutionist theory. While this progressivist paradigm has long been discredited, it is only recently that researchers have returned to the social dimension of writing with fresh eyes, better information and new theoretical insights. In this blog post I want to try to make sense of this positive moment and to try to chart a way forward.

Els Elffers
University of Amsterdam

Introduction

The Dutch Signific movement (ca. 1900–1960) is not widely known, although in the last few decades it has attracted considerable scholarly interest. This has resulted in some valuable publications (see the bibliography). The movement’s minor characters, however, have not been given much attention so far. This article focuses on the contribution to Significs of one of these minor characters, the Dutch linguist Jacques van Ginneken S.J. (1877–1945), who was involved in the movement from 1919 to 1924. During this period, Van Ginneken’s contribution carried some weight, but failed to exert a substantial influence. This was due to his brief and not very intense involvement, and, moreover, to the fact that his ideas about language and communication differed considerably from those of other members of the movement. Given this difference, the following questions will receive special attention, alongside more general issues: Why did Van Ginneken join the movement at all, and why did he continue his membership for some time? A further question is: Why did he eventually leave the movement?[1]

Preliminary information about Significs

Significs was an idealistic movement. Its core activities were language analysis, language criticism and, ultimately, language reform. The aim was: to gather together a group of prominent broad-minded intellectuals of various disciplines, in order to create, through language reform, new types of communication, which would be unaffected by vagueness, ambiguities, hidden prejudices and misleading formulations. Misunderstandings and mutual distrust would thus be avoided, and a better and more peaceful world would be made possible. Read more ›