Grammatology

This is a brief description of the Teotihuacan writing system in light of what was known in 2007, what can be expected according to the grammatology or science of writing and what we know about other writing systems in the cultural region of Mesoamerica.

Se trata de una breve descripción del sistema de escritura teotihuacano a la luz de lo que se conocía en 2007, de lo que se puede esperar según la gramatología o ciencia de la escritura y de lo que sabemos sobre otros sistemas de escritura de la región cultural de Mesoamérica.

Robin Fuller Rick Griffin was a leading figure of the psychedelic design movement in late 1960s San Francisco. This paper argues that although not an overt theorist, in his lettering for posters and comic books, Griffin reveals aspects of the visual semiotics of writing that provide insights for the semiotic study of graphically-embodied language. Griffin was preoccupied with the visual substance of writing. Not only was Griffin a student of myriad styles of letter (including, cholo graffiti, comic book lettering, Jugendstil and Victorian typography), but he was also preoccupied with how writing functions and how letterforms attain meanings. Through an analysis of Griffin's comic book and poster lettering, this paper will discuss aspects of the visual semiotics of alphabetic writing including: the relationship of embodied tokens to alphabetical symbols, the socio-semiotic function of styles of letter, and lettering as aesthetic signification.

O pós-humanismo da chamada “virada animal”, que atualmente estimula discussões acerca da animalidade em diversas áreas das Humanidades, oferece questões cruciais para a teoria da literatura. A atenção à figura do animal no discurso literário buscaria, por um lado, demarcar uma possibilidade típica da literatura de lidar com essa alteridade desconcertante – tarefa que pode também compartilhar com outras artes. Mas uma abordagem alternativa, que atente para a especificidade do literário em relação ao animal, é capaz de engajar o atual debate teórico interdisciplinar de forma mais eficaz. Se diversas áreas da expressão humana se encontram questionadas pelo olhar animal, para a teoria da literatura a questão da animalidade se reinscreve como fundamental. Baseando-me na politizada filosofia da linguagem de Jacques Derrida – principalmente De la grammatologie de 1967 – proponho uma leitura do papel da teoria literária na discussão sobre a animalidade a partir das esquematizações linguísticas, teóricas e políticas do romance A Maçã no Escuro de Clarice Lispector, de 1961. A escolha do texto lispectoriano como matriz de teorização e discussão foi motivada principalmente pelo fato de que a literatura dramatiza os modos pelos quais a linguagem produz sentidos, expondo o funcionamento linguístico à politização dos significados (traço característico da virada animal). Não apenas isso, mas o jogo gramatológico das diferenças típico do texto literário se apresenta, para a teoria derridiana, como a própria possibilidade da política. Dessa forma, proponho uma relação íntima entre o conceito altamente (bio)político do animal e o procedimento sígnico típico da linguagem – o qual se encontra, sempre já, politizado na literatura. Partindo do conceito derridiano da suplementaridade, exploro como o conceito de animal é produzido estruturalmente ao lado da noção de natureza, humano, linguagem e divindade. E, simetricamente, sugiro que o trabalho essencialmente suplementar da linguagem é ele mesmo possibilitado pelo conceito da animalidade. Assim, com o advento da virada animal, a literatura ao mesmo tempo passa incólume (pois seus sentidos sempre foram animalizados) e é também reconfigurada: o literário, uma vez que depende do animal sígnico, ameaça entrar em curto-circuito ao ter sua animalidade exposta. O curto-circuito teórico-crítico que proponho em A Maçã no Escuro seria uma das formas politizantes de abrir espaço para um necessário debate literário e gramatológico da questão do animal.

Với việc lựa chọn tư liệu nghiên cứu là 5 văn bản khắc in chữ Nôm hậu kì (1884-1945), mỗi văn bản chọn phân tích 1000 lượt chữ Nôm, bài viết đã nghiên cứu một số vấn đề về cấu trúc văn tự học chữ Nôm hậu kì trong lượng tư liệu trên ở hai cấp độ: cấp độ hệ thống văn tự và cấp độ đơn vị văn tự. Sau đây là một số kết luận quan trọng rút ra dựa trên các số liệu thống kê chi tiết và hệ thống.

Xét từ cấp độ hệ thống văn tự:

- Không có sự thống nhất tỉ lệ các loại cấu trúc chữ Nôm ở các văn bản khác nhau. Có một điểm thống nhất đáng chú ý là sự vắng bóng chữ Nôm tiểu loại hội âm chính phụ (thuộc loại E1) để tạo thành dạng âm tiết có mô hình CCVC.

- Nếu tính tỉ lệ trung bình của mỗi loại cấu trúc chữ Nôm trong 5 văn bản thì 10 loại cấu trúc chữ Nôm được chia thành 3 nhóm với sự sai biệt khá lớn về số đơn vị thống kê: nhóm thứ nhất là loại cấu trúc A1, với số lượng đơn vị thống kê rất lớn, khoảng 40-45%, tức gần bằng tổng số lượng của 9 loại còn lại; nhóm thứ hai gồm các loại C2, F1, F2, C1, A2, mỗi loại chiếm khoảng 10-15% số lượng đơn vị thống kê; nhóm thứ ba là các loại D, E2, B, E1, mỗi loại chiếm trên dưới 1% đơn vị thống kê.

- Tỉ lệ nhóm chữ Nôm “Tự Tạo” chỉ bằng khoảng ¼ nhóm “Mượn Hán”, bất kể là về số chữ hay số lượt chữ. Sự vay mượn văn tự này cũng thể hiện phần nào sự vay mượn về ngôn ngữ và văn hóa từ Trung Quốc sang Việt Nam.

- Với một số lượt chữ bằng nhau, thì các văn bản có tính văn chương và theo thể văn vần sử dụng nhiều chữ hơn, thậm chí có thể nhiều gấp đôi số chữ dùng trong các văn bản có tính hành chính nghi thức và theo thể văn xuôi.

Xét từ cấp độ đơn vị văn tự (nghiên cứu các biệt thể tự hình):

- Góc nhìn đơn văn bản: trong phạm vi khảo sát của bài viết, mỗi văn bản có từ 261 đến 574 ngữ tố, số ngữ tố có biệt thể tự hình dao động trong khoảng 3 – 11. Nếu tính tỉ lệ trung bình, ta có con số 1,03%, nghĩa là cứ 100 ngữ tố thì mới có khoảng 1 ngữ tố có biệt thể tự hình. Thêm nữa, mỗi ngữ tố thuộc loại có biệt thể tự hình thì cũng chỉ có 2 biệt thể, tức là con số ít nhất để có thể coi là có biệt thể.

- Góc nhìn đa văn bản: 5000 lượt chữ có 1468 ngữ tố, trong đó 114 ngữ tố có biệt thể tự hình, tổng số biệt thể tự hình này xuất hiện 970 lần, nghĩa là 7,8% tổng số ngữ tố có biệt thể tự hình, số biệt thể tự hình này xuất hiện trong 19,4% tổng độ dài 5 văn bản. Tuyệt đại đa số (104/114) các ngữ tố này chỉ có 2 biệt thể tự hình, điều này cho thấy “độ tụ” của biệt thể tự hình rất cao, ít ngữ tố có quá nhiều biệt thể tự hình. Ở cả hai cấp độ đơn văn bản và đa văn bản thì các biệt thể tự hình chủ yếu khác nhau về loại cấu trúc (10/24, 62/124), hoặc là thay đổi vị trí tương đối giữa các bộ phận trong mỗi chữ Nôm ý-âm tự tạo (5/24, 15/124).

- Xét từ cả hai góc nhìn đơn văn bản và đa văn bản, chúng ta cần phải xem xét lại một cách nghiêm túc về quan niệm “Nôm na là cha mách qué”, bởi những nghiên cứu về biệt thể tự hình như trên cho thấy cách viết chữ Nôm hậu kì khá chặt chẽ và nhất quán. Để làm rõ hơn vấn đề này thì vẫn cần những khảo cứu cụ thể và chi tiết hơn từ các góc nhìn văn tự, ngôn ngữ, lịch sử, xã hội.

In the second chapter of her book 'My Mother Was a Computer – Digital Subjects and Literary Texts' (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Katherine Hayles takes up the question of the “post-human” via the question of language. She extracts three “worldviews”: “speech”, “writing”, and “code” (understood as “the language of intelligent machines”, which is to say, in our day and age, computers), and she analyses their reciprocal relations, relying on her readings of the 'Course in General Linguistics' of Saussure, 'Grammatology' by Derrida, and numerous contemporary theoreticians of codes and of digital literature. We present and discuss the theses of the Author, and attempt to develop them by asking on the basis of what types of behavior and what definitions of language and of signification can one account for the difference between a human who “responds” and a non-human (animal or machine, pre- or post- human) that “reacts”.

RESUMEN:
La deconstrucción irrumpe en el pensamiento de la escritura, como una escritura de la escritura, que por lo pronto obliga a otra lectura: no ya imantada a la comprensión hermenéutica del sentido que quiere-decir un discurso, a su fondo de ilegibilidad y de deseo de idioma–, a las fuerzas no intencionales inscritas en los sistemas significantes de un discurso que hacen de éste propiamente un “texto”, es decir, algo que por su propia naturaleza o por su propia ley se resiste a ser comprendido como expresión de un sentido, o más bien “expone” éste como efecto –y con su legalidad y necesidad específica– de una ilusión para la conciencia.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca
/derridadeconstruccion.htm
VERSIONES [Ediciones]
1. VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo, “DERRIDA: DECONSTRUCCIÓN, DIFFÉRANCE Y DISEMINACIÓN; UNA HISTORIA DE PARÁSITOS, HUELLAS Y ESPECTROS”. En Revista OBSERVACIONES FILOSÓFICAS - Nº 19 / 2014 – ISSN 0718-3712. http://www.observacionesfilosoficas.net/derridadeconstruccion.htm
2.  VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo, “DERRIDA : DECONSTRUCTION, DIFFERANCE AND SPREAD; A HISTORY OF PARASITES, FOOTPRINTS AND SPECTRA”, En CASA LITTERAE, Universidad de Concepción, Abril de 2015,
http://www.casalitterae.cl/index.php/estadistica/83-derrida-deconstruction-differance-and-spread-a-history-of-parasites-footprints-and-spectra
3. VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo, “DERRIDA: DECONSTRUCCIÓN, DIFFÉRANCE Y DISEMINACIÓN; UNA HISTORIA DE PARÁSITOS, HUELLAS Y ESPECTROS”, En REDAZIONE ROSEBUD –Critica, Scrittura, Giornalismo– Enero 2015, Dublin, Ireland, http://rinabrundu.com/2015/01/05/derrida-deconstruccion-differance-y-diseminacion-una-historia-de-parasitos-huellas-y-espectros/
ADOLFO VÁSQUEZ ROCCA D.Phil

Με τίτλο <<ΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΟΛΟΓΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΚΑΘ' ΗΜΑΣ ΑΝΑΤΟΛΗΣ>> κυκλοφόρησε το 2013 το πολύ χρήσιμο βιβλίο με συνολικές σελίδες 212, το οποιο διατίθεται από τις εκδόσεις Σταμούλη Α.Ε., Αβέρωφ 2, Αθήνα, του συγγραφέα καθ. δρ. Αλέξιου Παναγόπουλου του Παναγιώτη, ο οποίος το αφιερώνει <<σε όλους τους διαχρονικά μαθητές και σπουδαστές μου, που με αγάπη διδάχθηκαν αυτά τα τόσο πνευματικά και πολιτισμικά σπουδαία και ωραία θέματα της γραμματολογίας μας, της καθ' ημάς Ανατολής, ως πολιτισμικής κληρονομιάς και παρακαταθήκης αιώνιας για όλο τον κόσμο, ως διδάσκαλος με γνώμονα το διδάσκων αεί διδασκόμενος>>. Ο ίδιος γράφει ότι πάντα είχα στο νού μου την δημοσίευση σε αυτοτελές πονημάτιο θέματα γραμματολογίας που δίδαξα σε μαθητές και σπουδαστές μου, που με αγάπη με ακροάσθηκαν. prof.ddr.hab. alexios panagopoulos

In On Touching, Derrida commends philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy for ‘taking into account [the] plasticity and technicity “at the heart” of the “body proper”’. Specifying the meaning of this plasticity and technicity’ Derrida writes, the ‘[s]upplementarity of technical prosthetics originarily spaces out, defers, or expropriates all originary properness: there is no “the” sense of touch, there is no “originary” or essentially originary touching before it’. What is ‘proper’ or ‘original’ to the body, it seems, is not any set of properties or capacities – including sensorial or perceptual powers – but rather the ‘plastic and substitutive structure of prosthetics’, the very possibility of the body’s ‘technical’ supplementation.

The Unicode standard for Egyptian hieroglyphs was validated in 2009 after years of debate, though the whole community of egyptologists was not associated to the process. As to the present time, Unicode validates the most common 1200 characters of the classical period. No extension is planned in a near future. However, if one needs to work on hieroglyphic texts as a whole, conspicuously more than 10 000 characters are needed, a goal Unicode certainly do not intend to achieve. I am currently working on a dictionary of ancient Egyptian, taking on the form of a lexical data base, and on another data base inventorying all the hieroglyphs. Both are based upon the lexical and palaeographical documentation I collected over the past fourty years, the last being intended to produce a catalogue as exhaustive as possible of all hieroglyphs presently known from publications in photographs or facsimiles. This work was never undertaken by egyptology since the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Champollion in 1822. Once completed it will serve as a source for a new digital font meeting all the requierements of the research, no matter which period of the writing is taken into account. This font will ultimately be used for the editorial work on the dictionary.

Lý Vận Phú, HÁN TỰ HỌC TÂN LUẬN, (Bùi Anh Chưởng, Dương Văn Hà, Nguyễn Đình Hưng dịch, Nguyễn Tuấn Cường tổ chức phiên dịch và xuất bản, đồng hiệu đính), Hà Nội: NXB Thế giới, 2018, ISBN: 978-604-77-5185-3.

Li Yunfu, New Perspective on the Theory of Chinese Characters, (Bùi Anh Chưởng, Dương Văn Hà, Nguyễn Đình Hưng translated; Nguyễn Tuấn Cường organized the translation and co-editors), Hanoi: World Publishing House, 2018.
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Xuất bản lần đầu năm 2012 tại Bắc Kinh bằng tiếng Trung Quốc, Hán tự học tân luận (漢字學新論) của GS.TS Lý Vận Phú (李運富) đã sớm nhận được sự hoan nghênh từ các nhà Hán tự học Trung Quốc cũng như giới văn tự học Đông Á. Nội dung cuốn sách rất toàn diện, bao gồm 10 chương lần lượt trình bày về các vấn đề: thuộc tính của chữ Hán; khởi nguyên của chữ Hán; nguồn tài liệu nghiên cứu chữ Hán (bao gồm cổ văn tự và kim văn tự); chỉnh lý chữ Hán; hình thể chữ Hán; cấu trúc chữ Hán; công dụng của chữ Hán; các mối quan hệ của chữ Hán; văn hoá chữ Hán. Cách cấu trúc này cho thấy cuốn sách đã bao quát hầu như toàn bộ các vấn đề then chốt nhất trong lĩnh vực Hán tự học, dưới một cách trình bày hệ thống, lớp lang, logic.

Điểm nhấn của cuốn sách là về mặt lý luận, đặt trọng tâm vào phân tích ba bình diện Hình thể, Cấu trúc và Công dụng (tức chức năng) của chữ Hán, xây dựng hệ thống mới cho Hán tự học với “một thể ba mặt” gồm Hình thể học, Cấu trúc học và Công dụng học. Chính vì lý do này nên bản dịch tiếng Hàn Quốc xuất bản đầu năm 2018 đã đổi nhan đề cuốn sách thành Hán tự học ba bình diện (三維漢字學).

Cuốn sách là một tài liệu tham khảo hữu ích cho những ai muốn tìm hiểu về Hán tự học nói riêng và văn tự học Đông Á nói chung. Đặc biệt đối với độc giả Việt Nam, cuốn sách cung cấp một cách luận giải mới về chữ Hán trên cả bình diện lý thuyết và tư liệu, là nền tảng để nghiên cứu về lịch sử chữ Hán ở Việt Nam cũng như các loại văn tự phái sinh từ chữ Hán như chữ Nôm Việt, chữ Nôm Tày, chữ Nôm Dao, chữ Nôm Ngạn.

(Trích Lời giới thiệu của TS Nguyễn Tuấn Cường – Viện trưởng Viện Nghiên cứu Hán Nôm)

The aim of this contribution is to determine to what extent it is possible to compare cuneiform to Chinese writing and its adaptations. Comparative linguistics, concerning the respective languages, will be also taken into consideration. In order to accomplish this, we will comment on some of the most important reference works in the specialized literature,
analyzing their results sub specie modernitatis. Alternative approaches and new lines of investigation will be eventually sought. Moreover, we will examine briefly the concept of writing, as a tool for the (re-)construction of cultural identity in a parochial rhetoric discourse.

El propósito de este ensayo es intentar comprender hasta qué punto es posible una aproximación comparativa entre la escritura cuneiforme y la escritura china (y sus adaptaciones), sin perder el contacto con la comparación de los idiomas relativos a ellas. Para ello, se comentarán algunos de los trabajos fundamentales de la literatura especializada, analizando los resultados sub specie modernitatis y buscando alternativas y nuevas líneas de investigación. Asimismo, se revisará brevemente el concepto mismo de escritura, en calidad de herramienta para una (re-)construcción de la identidad cultural dentro de un discurso retórico localista.

Writing!  Few human inventions are as pervasive and central to the modern world.  Each and every day, we read thousands of words—whether in traditional formats like books, magazines, or newspapers, or on the increasingly common computers, smartphones, ebooks, and tablets.  But even though writing seems thoroughly modern, it can be traced back more than 5,000 years to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

This lecture series and illustrated guidebook begins with a thorough consideration of what writing actually is, and precisely how it differs from other kinds of graphic communication systems, like pictography, rebus, and numerical notation.  Writing always records language, and it does so in surprisingly similar ways in all writing systems, whether ancient or modern.  In this sense, the way humans wrote millennia ago is not radically different from how we write today.  The lectures then turn to an exploration of the origins and development of writing, tracing the birth of our own alphabet, and its connections to the early Germanic Runes.  They also explore the independent invention of writing in China, and its adoption and elaboration in Japan.  In order to more deeply examine the subject of writing, the theory and practice of decipherment is explored.  Not all writing systems can be deciphered, so what are the limitations?  And how can they be overcome?  Several case studies put decipherment to the test, including Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (Champollion), Old Persian cuneiform (Grotefend), Mycenaean Linear B (Ventris), Mayan hieroglyphs (Knorosov) and Aztec hieroglyphs (Aubin and Lacadena).  Topics explored along the way include: the reasons behind the difficult and still incomplete decipherments of Etruscan and Meroïtic; the urge that numerous invididuals have had to reform writing, or to invent a more ‘perfect’ writing system; and an assessment of Darius the Great's claim that he himself invented the Old Persian (Achaemenid) syllabary.

In comparing the world's writing systems we slip the shackles of parochialism, recognizing that our alphabet is but one of many similar writing systems, all of which capably serve the needs of their users.  Writing is deeply conservative and resistant to change.  It is frequently adapted and altered during borrowing, but a culture rarely abandons or radically modifies its own extant writing system except in the most dire instances of cultural transformation.  An equally important topic is the deeply interdependent relationship of writing and civilization, including the social, political, and economic forces that led to the adoption of new media and technology for writing.  These forces not only shaped the form, function, and distribution of writing, but through it they have transformed civilization itself.  In the concluding lecture, all that has been discussed about the interplay between writing and civilization is used to predict one possible future of writing.

El desarrollo de la escritura es uno de los mayores logros intelectuales en la historia de la humanidad, ya que permitió el registro y la comunicación de ideas abstractas, factor que fue influyente en el surgimiento de las sociedades complejas en la antigüedad. A lo largo del tiempo, muchos sistemas de escritura se han desarrollado en diferentes partes del mundo; este hecho da cuenta de su valor intrínseco como una de las expresiones culturales más importantes de cada pueblo que la produce. Este es el caso del sistema jeroglífico del Egipto faraónico.

Las riveras del río Nilo fue el área donde floreció esta antigua civilización, la cual alcanzaría un esplendor cultural inigualado en sus distintas etapas de desarrollo a lo largo de casi tres milenios de existencia. La presencia de inscripciones, sobre los más diversos materiales, ha permitido conocer muchos de los aspectos de esta cultura. En este sentido, el estudio de este sistema de escritura, se presenta como una oportunidad, dado que es una manera de conocer más a fondo a esta civilización milenaria la cual tuvo gran influencia en el desarrollo de la cultura occidental, siendo precursora de muchos de los conceptos religiosos y filosóficos que aún se encuentran presentes en la actualidad.

Sin embargo, es común que en el mundo contemporáneo; cuando en una novela, filme, programa de TV o videojuego se abordan temas del Egipto faraónico, es casi inevitable que alguno de los personajes mencione que en los textos antiguos se encuentran los “arcanos secretos” que contienen la solución al predicamento en que los protagonistas de la historia están inmersos debido a una momia vuelta a la vida, a una ominosa maldición o a la reencarnación de algún siniestro personaje; clichés que pueblan el imaginario contemporáneo sobre el antiguo país del Nilo. En el caso de que la curiosidad por la cultura del antiguo Egipto sea mayor, la persona interesada puede buscar y encontrar -sin grandes dificultades en esta era digital- documentales audiovisuales, artículos o libros que traten sobre temas más acorde con la realidad. En éstos, también es común que se mencionen a los textos antiguos y, en ocasiones, se presentan algunos de sus pasajes; pero en la lengua en que se narra el programa u obra literaria. De tal manera, surgen las preguntas: ¿los jeroglíficos egipcios -esas curiosas figuras- pueden leerse en un idioma contemporáneo? ¿Cómo pueden estar seguros, los estudiosos del tema, que contienen esos mensajes y no los “arcanos secretos” que todos pregonan? Con el objetivo de disipar estas dudas y para que el lector pueda adentrarse en el apasionante proceso de leer jeroglíficos egipcios, en esta obra se presentan los tres pasos esenciales del desciframiento de una inscripción: la transliteración, transcripción y traducción.

Para finalizar este apartado, valgan unas palabras para el caso del último paso del desciframiento de una inscripción: como es bien sabido, la traducción de un texto no es una tarea sencilla, ya que implica mucho más que simplemente transferir palabras de un idioma a otro. Es necesario comprender el contexto social y cultural tanto del idioma emisor como del idioma receptor. Asimismo, se requiere conocer y manejar la terminología especializada sobre el tema que se está traduciendo. De tal manera, es común que en ocasiones queden sin resolver algunas cuestiones inherentes a las diferencias idiomáticas, ya que existen enunciados que se encuentran conectados de tal modo a su propio contexto sociocultural que resulta casi imposible brindar una traducción “exacta” que mantenga el mismo significado del texto original. En este sentido, declaramos que cualquier error, omisión o falta de claridad en las traducciones que en esta obra se presentan son entera responsabilidad de quienes estas líneas escriben. Sin duda alguna, aquella locución latina: omnis traductor traditor, cuya versión contemporánea es la expresión italiana: traduttore, traditore siempre será acertada.

Approximately in the mid-20th century a certain group of linguists pointed out that the development of linguistics had gone down a blind alley. In order to achieve a solution to the “crisis”, these scholars decided to search for common points between traditional Saussurean linguistics and other disciplines of science, through these close contact areas between linguistics on the one hand and either the humanities or natural sciences on the other hand, there arose a number of peripheral disciplines. Being loyal to this heritage, the author of this work explores the relationship between traditional Chinese grammatology represented by Shuo Wên Chieh Tzŭ (Shuo Wên for short) – The Structure Analysis of Primary Characters and Meaning Explanation of Secondary Characters and modern cultural linguistics. The opening passage, called “Teaching of Shuo Wên”, is the theoretical basis for the whole work. That is why the definitions of the three fundamental concepts of Chinese grammatology, i.e. liu-shu – Six Categories of Writing, pu-shou – radical and pên-yi – characters’ primary meaning are the foundation of the first chapter. The conclusion of the first chapter is developed into its practical results in the two subsequent chapters: “Culture of Shuo Wên” and “Etymology of Shuo Wên”. Both chapters obviously strive to connect grammatology and cultural linguistics. Organic synthesis of traditional and modern linguistic methods is the main result of the whole work.

This paper aims to approach the notion of writing in the digital age in order to reflect on the question of technodiversity, or the multiplicity of cosmotechnics. It takes off with what seems to be two criticisms against each other: one from Derrida's Of Grammatology, where he claims that 'the notion of technics can never simply clarify the notion of writing'; and the other from Stiegler's Discretising Time, where he openly criticized Derrida, 'I think that Derrida unfortunately has never really explored the condition of the history of the supplement'. The essay elaborates on the contexts of these claims and suggests that this 'indirect' debate could be read as a parallax concerning the diversities of writing, one horizontal and the other vertical. Derrida, this essays argues, through his setting up of opposition between Hegel and Leibniz, Western phonogram and Chinese pictogram, substance and relation, proposes a diversity of writings which cannot be reduced to each other; while Stiegler by outlining a history of grammatisation, from literal, to analogue and now digital writing, proposes that philosophy has to be rethought according to this history and its respective technological conditions. This essay proposes synthesizing Derrida and Stiegler's claims to reflect on the future of technodiversity.

This paper reviews the evidence for the visual separation, phonetic readings, and semantic significance of three common portrait glyphs in Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing: (1) the Foliated Maize God (IXIIM, JUUN, na); (2) the Tonsured Maize God (AJAN, WAXAK); and (3) the Female portrait (IX). Although visually similar and sharing certain traits common to the depiction of young and beautiful/handsome beings, contextual analysis nonetheless reveals several consistent graphic distinctions. The signs do not substitute for one another, and they have distinct reading values. Some reassessment of previous iconographic work on maize god(s) and lunar deities will be needed in light of the evidence for distinctions between these three signs.

En el horizonte de una investigación amplia acerca de las solidaridades entre las configuraciones de lenguaje (usos poéticos y formas de escritura incluidos) y las maneras de concebir lo real y habitar el mundo, se interrogará el legado de la antigua Mesopotamia (legado que ha sido sólo recientemente puesto a disposición de un público más vasto, llenándose así un vacío importante en la historia y genealogía de las concepciones intelectuales, las cuales suelen ser remontadas sólo hasta el pensamiento de Grecia clásica). Tras un bloque preliminar –en que, guiados por De la Gramatología de J. Derrida, se delimitarán los desafíos mayores que impone un pensamiento de la escritura– la serie de indagaciones a seguir pueden ser agrupadas bajo las rúbricas de dos títulos ya clásicos en los estudios mesopotámicos: Antes de la Musas (Foster) y Antes de la Filosofía (Jacobsen). En el primer bloque, a través de una lectura e interpretación de los llamados ‘textos literarios’ –y poniendo especial atención a las formas poéticas de significación– se examinarán las concepciones mesopotámicas de un ‘lenguaje fuerte’ (Enuma Elish), del origen y funciones de la escritura (El mito de Anzu, Enmerkar y el Señor de Aratta), para luego evaluar las hipótesis dominantes acerca de la intencionalidad de la escritura a la luz del lugar que se asignaba el hombre en el cosmos (el consabido pesimismo existencial mesopotámico: Atrahasis, Gilgamesh). En el segundo bloque del seminario, a través de una lectura y análisis de los llamados ‘textos científicos’, se examinará cómo, impactados por su propio invento, se desarrolla en Mesopotamia una racionalidad y conciencia histórica bajo la lógica de su escritura, introduciéndose un giro frente al pensamiento mitopoético al transformarse la comprensión y experiencia del espacio y el tiempo. Se pondrá atención a una serie de saberes (que en Mesopotamia se hallaban tramados en la figura del escriba y sólo pueden ser separados desde una perspectiva moderna) para evaluar hasta qué punto la semiótica, la hermenéutica y las estrategias específicas de la escritura se imponen en la taxonomía de lo real (análisis de ‘listas léxicas’), en la ‘ciencia’ de la adivinación deductiva como lectura de la escritura del mundo (tratados adivinatorios), en la medicina diagnóstica como lectura de la sintomatología del cuerpo (tratados médicos), y, sobre todo, en la historiografía como sometimiento de la dispersión temporal a formas de narración que configuran la experiencia histórica (crónicas).

This short communication is aimed at popularizing the puzzle of the undeciphered inscription engraved on a wall of the Baptistery of Pisa (Tuscany, Italy), which appears also in other religious monuments in Tuscany. The inscription is written in an unknown script and, being very short and without other examples with the same symbols all over the world (apart from some equivalent epigraphic documents from the same area), is still undeciphered. The goal of the following note, which absolutely does not aim to be original, and which is just recapitulative, is to trigger a discussion about the inscription and to encourage possible interpretations and, ultimately, new deciphering attempts.

An updated discussion and interpretation can be found here:

1) 

https://www.academia.edu/104257486/A_Puzzling_Religious_Inscription_from_Medieval_Tuscany_Symbology_and_Interpretation

2)

https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9252/3/3/15

This paper provides a detailed review of the principal assumptions, theoretical orientations, and working methodologies of archaeological decipherment, indicating how these perspectives have guided ongoing work in script comparison, stimulated investigations into the origins, development, and demise of writing systems, and served as a yardstick against which to measure proposed decipherments. The principles are then applied to Maya hieroglyphic writing in a detailed case study of the decipherment of the Maya phonetic sign /me/. The evidence in support of this particular decipherment measures up well against the aforementioned general principles, and is additionally supported by controlled contexts (sufficient in number and variety to allow testing), by the reconstructed grammatical rules and orthographic conventions of Classic Maya writing, and, not least, by the critical presence of biscripts and similar script-external constraints. Following determination of the sign’s function (a CV phonetic sign) and canonical reading value (me), its iconic origins are explored and determined to have arisen acrophonically from the Eastern Ch'olan term /mech/ “snail shell”. Contributions of this study include a nuanced analysis of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (a critical sixteenth-century biscript), the addition of several ‘new’ Classic Mayan lexemes and grammatical morphemes (including the /-em/ perfect participle), and the recognition of conventionalized markings for ‘shell’ in Maya and wider Mesoamerican art and writing. Most importantly, the study contributes to a broader theory and methodology of decipherment, and urges the application of comparative grammatological principles to the lesser-known scripts of Mesoamerica.

As Derrida charged, Plato’s famous declaration of speech’s superiority to writing would seem to have resonated with inheritor cultures similarly transitioning from orality to literacy, and especially the Islamicate; despite the explosion of writerly culture from the 8th century onward, Arabic scholarship continued to evince a categorical, if increasingly rhetorical, mistrust of writing. In the 14th century, however, as the age of encyclopedism dawned throughout the Islamicate heartlands, the superiority of writing to speech was formally and definitively asserted by Arabic and Persian encyclopedists, including most prominently Ibn al-Akfānī (d. 1348) of Mamluk Egypt and Shams al-Dīn Āmulī (d. 1352) of Ilkhanid Iran. It is hardly coincidental in this connection that the same century also witnessed the burgeoning popularity among scholarly and ruling elites of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), kabbalah’s coeval cognate—the occult science that posited the cosmos itself as a text to be read, even rewritten. Synthesizing these literary and occult-scientific currents, in the early 15th century a circle of Muslim neopythagoreanizing lettrists—chief among them Ibn Turka of Isfahan (d. 1432)—developed the first formal metaphysics of writing.
    This article analyzes Ibn Turka’s unprecedented valorization of writing over speech in terms both epistemological and ontological, as well as the sociocultural ramifications of this move throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Letter-number, he argued, is a form of light eternally emanated from the One; hence vision, that faculty of light, must be the sense most universal; hence visible text must be the form of the One most manifest. In support of this thesis, he synthesized the Avicennan-Ṭūsian doctrine of the transcendental modulation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd) with its illuminationist upgrade, the transcendental modulation of light (tashkīk al-nūr), to produce his signature doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf: letters of light as uncreated, all-creative matrix of the cosmos, gradually descending from the One in extramental, mental, spoken and finally written form. Far from being a peculiar intellectual rabbit trail of no enduring significance, I argue that Ibn Turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light was embraced by subsequent thinkers in Iran as the most effective means of conceptualizing and celebrating Islamicate writerly culture; these include the famed philosophers Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502) and Mīr Dāmād (d. 1630), founder of the so-called school of Isfahan. Nor was its influence limited to Aqquyunlu-Safavid philosophical circles; I further argue that Ibn Turka’s system informed the explosion of Persianate book culture more generally, and by extension Persianate visual culture, from the early Timurid period onward. A telling example in this context is the emergence of the album preface as a new genre of art history-theory in early Safavid Iran, a phenomenon that has been well feted and studied by art historians; but they have wholly elided high lettrism as the genre’s most immediate philosophical context. This principle may be extended to the Persian cosmopolis as a whole: two of the most seminal discourses on writing developed in the Ottoman and Mughal contexts, by Taşköprüzāde (d. 1561) and Abū l-Fażl ʿAllāmī (d. 1602) respectively, are demonstrably Ibn Turkian.
    Like Derrida was to do half a millennium later, in sum, early modern Muslim lettrists inverted Plato’s speech-writing hierarchy; unlike Derrida, for whom writing can have no ontological edge, they put forward a profoundly humanistic neopythagorean ontogrammatology as core of the philosophia perennis—and that so trenchantly that it served to shape Islamicate intellectual and aesthetic culture alike for centuries. The modern ideologues of East-West rupture notwithstanding, moreover, I propose this cosmology as a major node of Islamo-Christianate cultural continuity even to the present.

Der Hauptteil des Buches zeichnet in einem chronologischen Close-Reading die Entwicklung des Derridaschen Werkes und die Bedeutung seiner zentralen Termini – différance, Spur, Schrift – nach. Zugleich wird dabei die performative Struktur seines Denkens und Schreibens aufgedeckt, die für das Verständnis unverzichtbar sind: die Nachträglichkeit der Einführung des Terminus »différance«, die Bedeutung des »donc« und des »vielleicht«, des Sich-selbst-riskierens-im-Nichts-Sagen-Wollen sowie der Rede vom »Unmöglichen« im Kontext von Gerechtigkeit und Politik.
Eingebettet sind diese Lektüren in den Horizont einer notwendigen Neubestimmung der Grundlagen und Möglichkeiten (fundamental-)theologischen Sprechens.

The Hebrew Writing System in Contact

The study of Languages in Contact is synonymous with Contact Linguistics and needs today no excuse, but the study of writing systems in contact is still neglected. Given that “writing is not language” (Saussure 1916), contact linguistics and contact graphemics are not synonymous but merely private cases of contact semiotics.

The history of Hebrew writing spans over three millennia. Its condition, evolution and function are often determined by contact-induced transfer and integration. A survey and analyses of graphemic contact addresses themes such as the Phoenician origin of the Hebrew alphabet with its inherent polyphony; acquisition of new Aramaic characters; archaizing usage of ancient Hebrew characters for identitarian purposes in both ancient Judea and modern Israel; appropriation of Greek alphabetic counting and its linguistic impact and contact with Jewish language purposed writing systems. All have implications for the shape and function of the Hebrew writing system, which are at times anecdotal and at times permanent.

Description, analyses and critique employ notions such as xenography (foreign writing practice), graphemic transfer, (regional) Scriptura Franca (graphemic counterpart of Lingua Franca with no necessary overlap), foreign-induced graphophonemic under-differentiation, identitarian usage of writing, lexicalization of graphemic sequences, graphemic leveling, writing as language-generator agent, Jewish languages and writing systems, graphemics of Israeli Hebrew, dialectics of semiotic contact and integration. In spite of the jargon and in order to enhance accessibility, the presentation of evidence in the paper is often accompanied by tables, images and illustrations.

Most of the facts displayed in the present study are known to the scholarly community and thus offer no real novelty. The angle of approach, however, is broadly semiotic rather than narrowly linguistic. This study considers writing systems as an independent (though not isolated) field of research and should thus constitute a milestone in grammatology as a scholarly discipline.

http://aleph.nli.org.il:80/F/?func=direct&doc_number=000474190&local_base=RMB01

http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/listaarticulos?tipo_busqueda=ANUALIDAD&revista_busqueda=9671&clave_busqueda=2006

Le nom de Milman Parry est désormais immédiatement associé à la thèse de l’oralité d’Homère, mais ce n’est pourtant que dans un second temps qu’il en est venu à cette position. Il vaut la peine de retracer comment cela est advenu. Le rôle d'Antoine Meillet Le nom de Milman Parry est désormais immédiatement associé à la thèse de l’oralité d’Homère, mais ce n’est pourtant que dans un second temps qu’il en est venu à cette position. Il vaut la peine de retracer comment cela est advenu. Le rôle d'Antoine Meillet dans cette réorientation apparaît alors décisif dans cette réorientation.

Eine Lektüre und Interpretation der Struktur und Bedeutung von »La carte postale« (1980) – insbesondere der 52 Leerzeichen, die die postalischen Sendungen prägen – im Kontext von Derridas Gesamtwerk. Mit einer Rekonstruktion der Entstehung und der Konsequenzen von Derridas Rede von einer différance (mit a), sowie einer Interpretation seiner Bezugnahmen auf das jüdische Denken und die Beschneidung.

First published in Word and Text (Volume VII 2017).

One can trace the challenge to philosophy represented by the technical evolution of the 'human sciences' or 'conjectural sciences' in the diverging ways by which it is treated in the texts of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and others, during the mid to late 1960s. Derrida is writing partly in explicit response to the counterchallenge towards technology represented by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In this article, I analyse the relationship between an emergent notion of historicity and the historically emerging techno-sciences as a way of putting the question of the age into relief. The question concerns the current role of philosophy in a heritage still awkwardly divided between a residually existential philosophical tradition and a cybernetic influence in contemporary cultural, political, and technological affairs.

This paper first assesses the achievements and limitations of square scripts research in Vietnam, and then progresses to sketch out necessary steps that should be undertaken in the near future. The paper argues that researchers in Vietnam need to face the reality that the field of grammatology (or graphology), specifically regarding the research of square scripts, on the whole remains weak in many areas, despite some achievements, such as in the aspect of Nom script. Within the present academic circumstances, a key issue will be entering into the international arena and cooperating on multiple levels with international academia in order to absorb the knowledge and experience of the international community, thereby creating a stable foundation on which this field can be developed in Vietnam.

(PhD Dissertation, Stanford Mathematics 2001)
What sort of geometric creation and performance can or cannot be supported in a writing technology that spans freehand sketching, manipulable graphics, text, symbolic computation and simulation? How do we work with and gain intuitions about supposedly abstract things like a Riemannian manifold or an infinite-dimensional function space by manipulating material marks using chalk, pencil or computer? How do we exteriorize thought using the technologies of writing and sketching when it is about processes or objects that could not be embedded in a naive space-time?

I analyze in detail what differential geometric work can or cannot be performed easily in a hybrid medium provided by a generalized multi-modal writing and sketching technology. The critical part of this project is informed by insights from literary and performance studies as well as the mathematical sciences. Focusing on differential geometry through the lens of practice, I examine a-linguistic semiotic usage, and through the lens of phenomenological investigation, I examine how geometers work with continuous, smooth, or infinite structures and processes.

This investigation promises both pragmatic as well as conceptual results. Concretely, this study provides a design for future technologies of mathematical writing that will better augment the working practices of differential geometers.  Conceptually, my proposed materialized phenomenological view of mathematics as a performance practice eliminates three problems in philosophy and in critical studies of symbolic systems: (1) how do we represent continuity and smoothness using discrete symbolic systems? (2) how do we represent infinite things or processes? (3) why do symbolic systems have explanatory or generative power? These conundrums have occupied philosophers of mathematics, and have driven some to propose strict finitist or radically fictionalist theories of mathematics. Moreover, approaches to their resolution underwrite all the technologies that serve mathematical practice today, so these problems fundamentally affect the design of technologies for the working mathematician as well.

Malabou's work challenges philosophical habits of bracketing the body's materiality in accounts of subjectivity and lived experience. The New Wounded (2012) and Self and Emotional Life (2013) encourage us to consider how neuronal matter might be internal to accounts of subject formation and power while What Should We Do with our Brain? (2008) asks how the " discovery " of brain plasticity should alter conceptions of practical and political limits. The title can also be read as a pointed question to a philosophical tradition that has tended to treat claims about the nature of matter either with disinterest—as too reductive to be of interest—or with scepticism—as if the materialist gesture amounted to reasserting the priority of deterministic matter over the plasticity culture.

http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-379

The German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) occupies an interesting place at the intersection of several streams of linguistic scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century. As Professor of East-Asian languages at the University of Leipzig from 1878 to 1889 and then Professor for Sinology and General Linguistics at the University of Berlin from 1889 until his death, Gabelentz was present at some of the main centers of linguistics at the time. He was, however, generally critical of mainstream historical-comparative linguistics as propagated by the neogrammarians and instead emphasized approaches to language inspired by a line of researchers including Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), H. Steinthal (1823–1899), and his own father, Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (1807–1874).

Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several theoretical and methodological innovations which continue to play a role in linguistics. Most significant among these are his contributions to cross-linguistic syntactic comparison and typology, grammar-writing, and grammaticalization. His earliest linguistic work emphasized the importance of syntax as a core part of grammar and sought to establish a framework for the cross-linguistic description of word order, as had already been attempted for morphology by other scholars. The importance he attached to syntax was motivated by his engagement with Classical Chinese, a language almost devoid of morphology and highly reliant on syntax. In describing this language in his 1881 Chinesische Grammatik, Gabelentz elaborated and implemented the complementary “analytic” and “synthetic” systems of grammar, an approach to grammar-writing that continues to serve as a point of reference up to the present day. In his summary of contemporary thought on the nature of grammatical change in language, he became one of the first linguists to formulate the principles of grammaticalization in essentially the form that this phenomenon is studied today, although he did not use the current term. One key term of modern linguistics that he did employ, however, is “typology,” a term that he in fact coined. Gabelentz’ typology was a development on various contemporary strands of thought, including his own comparative syntax, and is widely acknowledged as a direct precursor of the present-day field.

Gabelentz is a significant transitional figure from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. On the one hand, his work seems very modern. Beyond his contributions to grammaticalization avant la lettre and his christening of typology, his conception of language prefigures the structuralist revolution of the early twentieth century in important respects. On the other hand, he continues to entertain several preoccupations of the nineteenth century – in particular the judgment of the relative value of different languages – which were progressively banished from linguistics in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Given Ezra Pound’s sustained interest in languages, translation, and systems of inscription, as well as his formidable literary archive, it seems odd at first glance that Derrida should show relatively little direct interest in a poet whose shadow still looms over modern and contemporary poetry in English––not to mention poetry in Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese. Pound’s lifelong fascination with Neoplatonism exposed him to negative theology, and his experiments with the Chinese language and systems of inscription in his epic poem, The Cantos, marks out his poetics as one of sustained meditation on the nature of the sign and the latencies of signification. One might consider Pound’s aesthetics, his philosophical outlook, and even his politics, and think of a number of Derrida’s more well-known works as candidates for direct dialogue: Of Grammatology for “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry”; Archive Fever for Pound’s own immense, porous archive; Acts of Literature for The Cantos; and so on. Derrida famously professed an aversion to writing on Samuel Beckett by virtue of what he saw as an inhibiting intellectual proximity.  Derrida and Pound seem to be in little danger of any similar problem, and the paucity of direct engagement might be seen to confirm a sense of indifference. The following discussion will argue that Pound and Derrida share important intellectual terrain despite the divergences in their attitudes, aesthetics, and modes of thought. By necessity it will be selective rather than exhaustive, taking the themes of signification, archives, and negative theology as points of orientation.