I Confess: the Global Alphabet is no more magical than any method or system that works. |
But it is heretical, breaking (or bending) the two “axioms” that define linguistics since de Saussure (1914). But counter-examples have been known forever, although never before brought into a coherent theory. And axioms don’t have counter-examples. The Global Alphabet is as legitimate as the three-dimensional (i.e. global) geometry of Lobachevski, the Galileo of Geometry.” |
He discovered it by daring to deny the Fifth postulate of Euclid’s Flat Earth geometry. Counter-examples to Euclid can be found on spherical planets like Earth, on which longitudes meet at the poles.) |
The Global Alphabet rejects onomatopoeia, but the Key-letters are instead Kinesthetic & Graphic, breaking de Saussure’s second axiom no more than Chomsky/Halle’s phonology. |
The Global Alphabet bends de Saussure’s first axiom (that words are arbitrary sequences of phonemes, with an equally arbitrary meaning) just as nanosyntax does, with tits assumption that a word can spread over whole sub-trees. Asmittedly, the “heretical new assumption” of sub-morphemesgoea much further than nanosyntax does, in recognizing single-consinant submorphemes. But note that this heresy started not with nanosyntax, but with Bloomfield, with his “heretical “notion of the morpheme. Bolinger’s phonesthemes (like bi-consonantal roots in Semitic) took the heresy one step further, but remains no more than a list of speculative analyses. Taking the final step to single-segment “roots of roots” should not be confused with bi-consonantal root theory, much less phonesthemes or phonosemantics, especially because of the rejection of onomatopoeia as a central principle of lexical analysis. Both the short and expanded tables are based on decades of dictionary analysis, and should be adjusted for empirical accuracy in these terms. It is a synchronic descriptive analysis of the languages covered, elusive as meaning may be. |