Basso and Anderson 1977

Basso and Anderson 1977

Reference
	Basso, Keith H., and Ned Anderson. 1977. "A Western Apache writing system: The symbols of Silas John." In Fishman 1977. (Also in Science 1979--1986.) Interest level: academic.

Summary
	Silas John Edwards was a Western Apache shaman, founder, and leader of a nativistic religious movement established among the Apaches in the early 1920s. At age 21, he created a writing system so an extensive set of prayers expressing the ideological core of his religion could be recorded in permanent form and disseminated among followers. The script was used only for these rituals and not for other Apache prayers or secular use. The script encoded nonverbal information that described the actions to be performed as part of the ritual. These symbols may be classified as phonetic semantic signs.
	Author proposes the term kinetic sign to label such symbols.

Context for this page:

Bibliography module: Basso and Anderson 1977
In overview module: Bibliography (Literacy): B
In modular book: Bibliography (Literacy), by Doris Gallemore, Trudi C. Hunt, Jeanne Swanson, and Stephen L. Walter
In document collection: Reference materials
In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 18 May 1999

© 1999 SIL International