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The Alphabet. Goals. History of alphabet History of spelling rules Explore issues in representation. Types of Orthographies. Orthography ortho = “correct” — graph = “write” Pictograph Every concept is represented by a picture. Pictographs. 2 problems My trees look like broccoli
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Goals • History of alphabet • History of spelling rules • Explore issues in representation
Types of Orthographies • Orthography • ortho = “correct” — graph = “write” • Pictograph • Every concept is represented by a picture
Pictographs • 2 problems • My trees look like broccoli • How to represent concepts like ‘beauty’, ‘son’, ‘mind’ • Rebus principle • Use existing symbols that are homophones for other concepts • Use the picture of ‘sun’ for ‘son’
Ideographs • Use abstract pictures to arbitrarily represent concepts, both concrete and abstract • China is a culture that uses a mixed ideographic system
Ideographs • Advantages • If two language groups use the same ideographic system, they can communicate through the orthography • Disadvantage • HUGE number of symbols
Syllabary • Each symbol represents a syllable • Requires significant restraints on what constitutes a syllable so that the number of symbols is reasonable • Significance is that the symbols represent sounds, not concepts
Alphabet • Ideally, one sound = one symbol • But • The language changes but the orthography doesn’t • What of the ‘k’ of ‘knee’ and ‘know’ • The orthography represents an older form of the language
Alphabet • We don’t want to represent sounds that are not distinctive • Dialect differences shouldn’t be copied in the representation • Maintain relationships among words • create & creation
History • Most existing alphabets descend from the Greek • Roman & Cyrillic alphabets borrowed from Greek • Thai descended from Devanagari • Korean created by king (possibly influenced by Roman alphabet)
History • Born of economics • To track trade agreements, clay figures were put in a clay envelope which was fired • To conclude agreements, the envelope was broken and the figures counted
History • What if you forget what was in the envelope? • Before firing the envelope, scratch a picture on the outside • But now, there is no need for the figures inside the envelope
History • Pictographic systems were developed • hieroglyphs (hiero = ‘sacred’; glyph = ‘carve’ • Egyptians began to interpret hieroglyphs for the sound of the word rather than the meaning • Called rebus
Rebus • This move to representing sound is important in the history of writing systems
Hieroglyphics • Large set of pictures representing objects and concepts • ‘Determinatives’ • indicate whether a symbol represented a concept or a sound • 22-24 symbols for consonants
Consonants • The consonant symbols were borrowed by Phoenicians and Semites • Created an order and named the symbols • Improved education system and increased literacy
Consonants • Names • alef = ‘ox’ • beth = ‘house’ • gimel = ‘camel’ • daleth = ‘door’
Semitic • Semitic languages build words on different principles than Indo-European languages • e.g. kitab = ‘book’ • katab = ‘he wrote’ • katib = ‘writing’ • Each word consists of a 3 consonant root in and around which vowels are inserted
Greeks • The Greeks borrowed this system of consonants • Symbols for sounds not in Greek were mapped onto the vowels of Greek • This creates the first alphabet
Alpha ox
B Beta house
Other Developments • boustrephedon • ‘as the ox plows’ • Originally, characters did not have a set orientation, but would change depending on the direction of writing (left to right or right to left)
Other developments • zeta (Z) is the sixth letter, not the last • what happened? • Some sequences were so common that characters were created for them • e.g. Ψ = psi
Roman Alphabet • Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet (through the Etruscans) and adapted it to Latin • The Etruscans did not have a character for [g] • Latin needed a character for [g] but did not have the sound [z] • So, the character Z was reshaped as G
Roman Alphabet • Latin had two forms of [k] • It uses ‘C’ to represent one • It adopted ‘Q’ to represent a [k] with lip rounding and emphasized it with a following ‘U’
Roman Alphabet • The character ‘C’ was created by tipping Γ ‘gamma’ 45° • The character ‘X’ was used to represent [ks] • This sequence is so common that a single character was developed
English • English distinguishes between [s] and [z] • So it needs a character for [z] • It resurrected zeta and put it at the end of the alphabet
New Characters • Both the Romance languages and English need new characters to represent new sounds • Romance languages created or reused ‘J’ and ‘V’ • English created ‘Y’ and ‘W’
Y • ‘Y’ had various duties • represents [y] • represents [i] • note ‘tyre’ & ‘tyger’ • represents [ɵ] • ‘ye olde bookstore’
J/V and Y/W • Different languages = different orthographies • J/V are Latinate • Y/W are English
Spelling Rules • Languages change over time • Spelling systems must be augmented to reflect that change • Additions to characters • ü or ç or ø
Spelling Rules • Addition of new sounds requires new representations • e.g. the addition of [∫] required the digraph ‘sh’ • A consensus is required to recognize that the digraph (two letters) represents one sound
Spelling Rules • A representation can mimic the historical changes in a language • The ‘silent e’ of English spelling mimics a sound change in Old English • cf. car vs. care
History of the silent e • First, need to understand syllable structure • A syllable can begin with a consonant or vowel (bat and at) • A syllable can end with a consonant or a vowel (set and see) • The sequence VCCV is divided as VC | CV • The sequence VCV is divided as V | CV
History of the silent e • Two rules of Old English • All vowels is closed syllables are short • a closed syllable ends in a consonant • All vowels in open syllables are long • an open syllable ends in a vowel
History of silent e • How to represent long and short vowels? • Use two symbols, e.g. food and feed • Represent a syllable as open if it contains a long vowel • cf. pin and pine
History of the silent e • The ‘e’ at the ends of words indicates that the preceding vowel was originally long • The representation VCV makes it look like the preceding vowel was in an open syllable, although it wasn’t
History of the silent e • Why ‘stop’ but ‘stopping’ • Doubling the character ‘p’ makes the preceding syllable look like a closed syllable so that the vowel is ‘short’ • Why ‘grope’ but ‘groping’ • In ‘groping’, the syllable appears to be open, so no ‘e’ is required
Problems • Once the ‘e’ is used for reasons other than representing a single sound, it can be used for other purposes • In ‘lettuce’ and ‘menace’ it doesn’t signal the length of the previous vowel • Instead, it is used to signal how to pronounce the charcter ‘c’
Problems • Conflict between two rules • invoke and invocation • convoke and convocation • Why two characters (‘c’ and ‘k’) for the same sound? • Because the ‘e’ is needed for the vowel length rule but not for the rule about ‘c’
Spelling reform • Occasionally argued that English spelling should be changed to improve education system • But, spelling also retains the relationships among words
