On 4/16/19 11:52 PM, James Kass via Unicode wrote:
>
http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-writes-love-letter.html
According to a comment, the Yukaghir love letter as semasiographic
communication was debunked by John DeFrancis in 1989 who asserted that
it was merely a prop in a Yukaghir parlor game. Perhaps that
debunking was in the very book cited by Martin J. Dürst earlier in
this thread.
The blog page comment went on to say that Geoffrey Sampson, who wrote
the book from which the blogger learned of the Yukaghir love letter,
published a retraction in 1994.
Thank you. I read about it in Sampson's book, but had not heard about
the debunking or the retraction.
Almost too bad; it seems to work so well. The closest thing I know to
something like that, expressing ideas but not language-dependent, would
be mathematical notation.
~mark
