Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Side 205

different forms (I include the “underlying” indices here to clarify
my point):
elle1 se1 lave les mains – elle1 lui2 lave les mains
hún1 þvær sér1 um hendurnar – hún1 þvær henni2 um hend-
urnr
This however is where I take issue with the linguists. I do not see
the indices as “underlying”, for as the observant reader will note,
their existence in the ink of this page is as solid as any of the other
symbols. It would in fact be a great improvement if correctly for-
mulated indices were added to, say, legal documents, to indicate
whose his and whose hers belong to whom. For the fact is that the
English versions of these two sentences are not in the least identi-
cal if we include intonation and eyebrow-movements, and above
all context – which is what indices in fact try to indicate – indices
are of course indicating digits. In this respect we may think of them
as a type of punctuation, since punctuation is simply a device for
adding grammatical, syntactic or intonational information to a
written text. To take an example, we use punctuation to disam-
biguate the following two sentences, whose difference lies more in
context than in the sequence of sounds:
I know it’s Mother
I know its mother (i.e. the cat’s mother)
We might reflect that the history of orthography includes a steady
trickle of clever scribal solutions for disambiguating written lan-
guage. Classical Semitic texts, arabic and Hebrew, do not mark the
vowels in their writing: this does not mean that the vowels are
underlying, it means that arabs and Jews who have to make their
own ink are not going to waste it on unnecessary vowels. Early
vowel-less scripts showed word division, either with spaces or
other means of punctuation, but with the invention of vowels this
practice ceased.6 Spaces between words reappeared in Western
scribal practice in the later Middle ages (according to Saenger,
PÉTur KnúTSSOn
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6 Paul Saenger, Spaces Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Stanford, California:
Stanford university Press, 1997, p. 9.
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