Systems of Signs

• The signary pertains to the complete inventory of the basic signs of a given writing system.

Words and Logographs §

• Words are the typical units of lexicology and lexicography. They are meaningful and can stand alone as a complete utterance.

  • Words have positional mobility. They can be taken out of context and arranged in lists.

• However, what constitutes a word is highly debatable and not universal across other languages.

• The structural make-up of words depends on typological characteristics of languages.

  • In isolating languages words are invariant in that they do not undergo regular formal alterations that serve grammatical functions
  • In inflecting languages words are changed to express grammatical relationships.
  • In agglutinating languages words are built up out of units expressing grammatical relations.
  • In polysynthetic languages it is difficult to distinguish words from other linguistic entities such as clauses and sentences.

• The orthographic word is the unit bounded by spaces in the written languages. The phonological word is the corresponding unit for speech.

• Words are not based on prior explicit linguistic knowledge. That is, they came as written signs interpreted as words which were then recognized as operational units of the writing system.

• Logographic Writing - writing where the basic functional units are interpreted as words.

• Rebus writing - Loss of the pictorial quality of the signs facilitated their transfer to semantically unrelated words

• Ideographic Writing - the basic functional unit is interpreted as an idea and meaning

• Nuclear Writing - writing which omits grammatical information.

• Double Articulation - (aka duality of structure). It means there are two levels of patterning — a language can be divided into meaningful units, but at the same time it can be divided into meaningless phonological segments.

  • Units may serve as independent characters or as part of other units.
  • It is a defining characteristic of human language.

• Some languages (such as Sumerian and Chinese) started out by depicting pictures of objects. The referents of these signs were physical objects.

• More complex ideas then required extending the language. However, these followed the rebus principle where signs gradually lost their pictorial quality.

  • Some signs also acquired double meanings and homonyms. This meant that signs had to be differentiated either orthographically or phonetically.
  • In Sumerian, writing transitioned from the nuclear form (what Chinese has) to a from that includes grammatical information to provide clues about the grammatical form of words.
  • An alternative path is taken by Chinese where words are not modified when they are used in a sentence.

• Signs also began to be combined.

  • In the case of Sumerian-like languages, simple signs were aggregated to produce more complex signs.
  • In the case of Chinese-like languages, the radicals in each character did not correspond to a general rule. Rather, the language’s vocabulary simply extended.

Syllables and Syllabaries §

• A syllable is a unit of speech that can be articulated in isolation and bear a single degree of stress. Their specific structure is dictated by Phonetics.

  • Syllables consist of a nucleus (usually a vowel) and an optional initial and final margin (usually consonants).
  • It can also be divided into an onset which is the initial margin, and the rhyme which is further divided into the peak (roughly the nucleus) and coda
  • A syllable with a vowel in coda position is open, and with a consonant it is closed.
  • A syllable is heavy if it includes either a long vowel, a consonant in coda position or a complex type.
  • For the most part, syllables follow C-V-C form. ¹.

• In this context, languages can be characterized based on

  • Their syllabic structure and syllabication rules (i.e. CVC or CVC-CV).
  • The importance of stress in defining and articulating the word.
  • The importance of vowel length in distinguishing between words.
  • Pitch levels. Tone Languages are languages that use the pitch level to distinguish words. When tone is important, it usually cannot be abstracted from an atonal syllable.
    • Sometimes, tone may interact with other phonological distinctions such that certain tones are restricted to certain syllables.

• The requirements of a phonemic analysis are not the same as those of designing a practical writing system.

• Fewer syllables means a simpler language. However, no language can encode all the syllabic distinctions inherent within them.

• Syllabaries - are writing systems that operate on basic graphic units that are interpreted as speech syllables (for example Japanese kana)

  • These languages join syllables to form longer words.
  • These also tend to have a reduced number of symbols. ². More symbols would imply more syllables to articulate them, however any redundancies (i.e., symbols pronounced the same way) could be removed.
  • It is economic. The number of the speech syllables of a language is closed while that of words is open. However, there is a trade-off with clarity of the language.
  • Syllabaries tend to be incomplete. Regardless, the incompleteness arises from the fact that good knowledge of the language is required for reading them.

• Some languages have developed both syllabographic components without sacrificing logography. These developments happen either gradually or to adapt with modern usage.

• Modern writing systems were designed with the syllabic structure of the language in mind. The syllable is an intuitive unit of speech and so must, heuristically, correspond to some unit of writing as well.

• Ancient writing systems reflect the discovery of the linguistic unit of the symbol.

  • When a writing system with a strong morphographic component is adopted for another language it is possible to assign new interpretations of words or morphemes of the recipient language to extant signs of the donor language

• The suitability of using syllables as a basis for the writing system depends on the syllable structure. Syllabaries face two problems

  • Inadequate linguistic fit - Comes from being too detailed with translating syllables to symbols (i.e., including tone). Can also come with very complex syllabic structures.
  • Extensive signaries - having many symbols. Since symbols (in this case) would correspond to a syllable, this requires extensive knowledge of the syllabary and the nuances of pronunciation.

Segments and Alphabets §

• Phonemic segments are widely believed to be what alphabetic letters encode.

• On an abstract level, speech is representable in terms of finite sequences of segments. However, *a good description of speech need not correspond with speech itself. *

• These writing systems use letters and alphabets.

• The pronounceability of alphabetic words rests on a process known as phonological recoding - the transformation of mental representations of sequences of letters into mental representations of sequences of sounds.

• Phonemic writing means that there is a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and their written representation. This is an ideal that has not been achieved by any particular language. There are three challenges

  • Even in a phonemic writing system, interpretations only serve as contrasts reflected in spelling.
  • Uncertainty arises when dealing with two distinct languages with different contrasts reflected in their letters.
  • There is a bias in the formation of the language in that it was informed and it would simply be hindsight to say it was a phonemic recording. In other words, the language’s formation likely did not have this in mind.

• Even within a language, letters are polyvalent — they have more than one phonetic interpretation. This can arise for three reasons ³ and can acuse orthographies to operate on more than one level.

  • Historical:
    • As time goes on, spoken forms change but written forms do not. This means that over time, there is a shift from using speech to using writing as the basis for the “ground-truth” of the language.
    • Language reforms may occur
  • Systematic.
    • Similar groups of phones may be divided into phonemes differently in different languages.
    • Letters are not only influenced by phonetics but also by morphology and the use of words.
  • Haphazard
    • This can arise when adapting from another language.
    • Includes the use of diacritics, digraphs and trigraphs which can affect the formulation of phonemes, morphemes, and graphemes.
    • Can manifest in loanwords, inconsistent spellings and technical innovations ⁴

• A higher phoneme-grapheme ratio indicates that the spelling system is more removed from phonemic writing. Those with high ratios are called deep while those that are close to are shallow / surface.

  • Surface orthographies are closer to the ideal of phonemic writing.

• An orthography can be supplemented with additional letters and diacritic marks to handle phonemic segments that have no correspondence to the letters (or require additional information about articulation)

• Suprasegmentals - they do not occur before or after, but occur together with other vowels and consonants. They relate to syllables and sometimes larger units.
• Suprasegmentals make it more difficult to segment the language.

Links §

• Coulmas - Ch. 3 - 5
  • Ch. 3 contains a more in depth discussion on Chinese and Sumerian script.
  • Ch. 4 contains discussions on Cherokee, Cree, Vai, Japanese Kana, and Yi script
  • Ch. 5 discusses Latin and how it is a close approximation to the ideal of segmentation.

Footnotes §

1. Semitic languages such as Hebrew are an exception to this .They follow C-V-C-V. ↩

2. Examples include Cuneiform, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese. ↩

3. Coulmas analyzes Latin in particular. ↩

4. Such as printing and the þ symbol. This is the reason why we have “Ye Olde Tavern”, where the Y corresponds to “Th”. ↩