Re: Optimum number of symbols

Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>At 11:27 pm -0400 21/5/02, Mike S. wrote:
>>On Tue, 21 May 2002 21:08:46 -0500, Thomas R. Wier
>[snip]
>>> I think it is fair to
>>>say that English orthography is, in many respects, just a
>>>more exaggerated version of that kind of morphophonological
>>>alternation.
>>
>>Indeed it is.  Excruciatingly so.  It was for this reason
>>that I argued that it was knocking down a strawman to cite
>>English in order criticize phonemic systems.
>
>Is it?  No one has mentioned French orthography - another strawman?
>
>My daughter-in-law who is as French as they come, being born & brought up
>right in the heart of the Hexagone, claims that French spelling is much
>more difficult than English.  At least in English, when we write a
>grammatical ending on a word, we pronounce the thing (even if we have to
>learn that -ed is usually just [t] or [d] and not [Id]).  What are we to
>make of a system where kids have to learn the correct spelling of various
>grammatical endings which are normally silent, and have to spend time
>learning the different spellings of homophonous endings?  Has no one except
>me ever received letter from a French national with spellings like
>"j'était"?  J'en doute.
>
>I contend the neither French nor English are strawmen.  The simple truth of
>the matter is that alphabetic scripts have never been phonemic until the
>creation of some last century.  Where alphabets were developed and evolved
>over centuries we have admittedly a 'tendency towards phonemic spelling'.
>Indeed, it can be argued that it was this tendency that helped develop the
>phonemic theory, which in turn influenced the development of alphabets for
>languages which had not written before.
My main statement comes in a moment, but I want to inject here that
I disagree with your assessment that alphabetic scripts have never
been phonemic until the creation of some last century.  IMO, written
ancient Greek and Latin both fall solidly into the category of
phonemic scripts, the occasional quirk or irregularity notwithstanding.
The basic and universal utility of the phonemic principle has been
in effect--indeed proven IMO--at least since the development of the
Greek alphabet with vowel letters, even if the Romans and Greeks did
not have the same precise modern understanding of "phoneme" we have.



>In English and French, the correspondence between alphabet and phoneme is
>less close than it is in, say, Welsh or Spanish or, indeed, ancient Greek
>or Latin (neither of which were written totally phonemically).
In the previous paragraphs, you seem to be arguing one of two
things here, and I'm afraid I don't know which. Here are the two
possible arguments I have in mind, with my response to both.

(1) Written English and French are basically phonemic, but contain
nonphonemic characteristics whose complexity present great
difficulties in both learning and usage; therefore phonemic
systems aren't all they're cracked up to be.

This does not strike me as a sound argument.  If the scholars
(or literate population as a whole) responsible for creating the
orthography for one reason or another (morphemics as in English
or marking syntax as in French) choose to introduce *non*phonemic
irregularities into the written language, and consequently these
irregularities end up causing more trouble than their worth,
in what way does this indict the phonemic idea?  If anything,
this seems to be an argument *in favor* of a stricter phonemic
implementation.

(2) Written English and French are basically phonemic, but contain
nonphonemic characteristics which enhance the written language;
A stricter phonemic implementation would remove these benefits;
therefore pure phonemic systems are not necessarily ideal.

This was the basic tack of Thomas Wier in his thoughtful post
on the German final stops, where he pointed out that a stricter
phonemic interpretation would end up being less useful to the
language's speakers.  This argument to me was valid, and although
I pointed out that it could be argued that phonemics could be
insisted upon anyway, I conceded that given the regularity
if not elegance of the current German orthographic convention,
I could see the benefit of occasionally compromising the
phonemic principle to accommodate the morphemic principle.

The problem is that the compellingness found in this argument
proceeding from the German example does not extend well to
English or French; written English's overbearing insistence
on morphemics and written French's overbearing insistence on
marking inflections long since disappeared from speech, while
useful in some ways, are clearly not worth their cost in terms
of learnability or ease of usage, or at least I think very few
people would argue otherwise.  I personally think both of these
systems are atrocious, and this atrociousness stems from their
*non*phonemic charcteristics that, on balance, are not
enhancements in the least.

Again, I am not sure what you are arguing.  The argument of (1)
is simply illogical;  the argument of (2) is logical but can not
be said to apply to either French or English as they are currently
implemented.



>Also, as I've pointed out before, other scripts besides alphabets can and
>do/did represent phonemes (assuming, for the sake of argument, that
>phonemes are valid entities).  In the Semitic languages, when the consonant
>phonemes are known an L1 speaker can generally infer the correct vocalic
>phonemes from context; therefore, traditionally Semitic alphabets have
>represented only consonant phonemes.  The same feature was, apparently,
>true of ancient Egyptian: only the consonant phonemes needed indication for
>a L1 speaker.  But the ancient script contains not only symmbols for single
>phonemes, but also symbols for two or three consecutive consonant phonemes.
It's true that these scripts, which might be called proto-alphabetic,
indeed marked consonant phonemes.  As I understand it--I might be
wrong--most of these languages (unlike Greek) had only a few vowel
phonemes, and thus could more easily afford not marking them.  I would
have to think though, that although these scripts were basically
adequate, problems would occasionally arise in any script with such
an array of polyphonous symbols.  Everything else being equal, wouldn't
you have to agree that such a script is improved by marking vowels?



>All written systems, except purely logographic systems such as traditional
>Chinese and ancient Sumerian, either contain large phonetic element (e.g.
>Akkadian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, modern Japanese) or are, in
>theory, entirely phonetic (i.e. syllabaries and alphabets).
>
>But as R.Y. Chao (an L1 Chinese speaker) wrote:
>"It is making a false dichotomy to say that Chinese writing represents
>meaning and that syllabic and alphabetc writing represents sound.  The
>written symbol  |
>               / \_  [ach - best I can do with ASCII!]
>              /
>represents as much the spoken word _jén_ [Pinyin _ren4_] as the meaning
>'man'; the written form _man_ represents as much the meaning 'human being'
>as the sound [m{n]."
>
>All written systems, in fact, are ways of recording the real language (i.e.
>what people actually _speak_) in such a way that someone who knows &
>understands the representation used can reconstitute the original.
>Unfortunately, of course, in some ancient scripts reconstitution of the
>original can be done only imperfectly (ancient Egyptian) or not at all
>(Linear A [at present]); but that is rather like the position where digital
>material was archieved, say, 40 years back and no (proper) record of the
>system used was kept or it has been lost.
>
>The fact that we can, e.g. 'read' ancient Egyptian in that we understand
>what the words mean and how they fit together, without knowing their proper
>pronunciation, can lead us to suppose that written language is primarily
>concerned with meaning.  But this IMO is false.  There are counter-examples
>where the script is known and, therefore, the language can be 'read' in the
>sense that one can approximate the ancient pronunciation, but the meaning
>of what is written is unknown.  The surviving Eteocretan inscription on
>Crete are obvious examples: written in the Greek alphabet, but the language
>is entirely lost.
Interesting.  In regards to connection between written language
and meaning, I have a few thoughts that I would prefer to develop
in a separate post.



>Also, even if ancient Egyptian, say, had been written in a fully 100%
>phonemic system - vowels as well as consonants - we'd still not know
>exectly how it was pronounced unless some astute phonologist from ancient
>times had given us a detailed description of the different phonetic
>realizations of the phonemes in different environments.  All we would have
>is a more accurate _approximation_ than the one we have now.  But as,
>without time travel, we'll never have occasion to lisyen to or chat with an
>ancient Egyptian, one approximation holds little advantage over another.
This is correct, but to be clear, phonemic scripts are not intended
to represent pronunciation.  They are only intended to represent
the logical contrastive units of speech.  It is "behind" these symbols
that the rules for inferring pronunciation exist.



>IMO no type of writing is per_se superior to another - it depends on the
>language and, to some extent, what you're writing.  The Linear B syllabary
>appears to have been a satisfactory way of recording early Greek for
>clerical purposes; but few would deny the later alphabet gives less
>ambiguous representation and is, for Greek, more suited for general &
>literary contexts.  Nevertheless, it is notable that, altho the alphabet
>had been adopted by the Greeks as early as the 8th cent BC, it continued to
>be written in a syllabary in Cyprus as late as the 2nd cent BC.
>
>But a language with a simpler phonology than ancient Greek, and with a
>proponderence of open syllables might well be written more efficiently in a
>syllabary.
>
>At any rate, as this interesting thread continues, I am coming more and
>more to favor the idea of a syllabary for BrSc  :)
>
>Ray.
I agree that the details of an optimum writing system will
tend to vary among languages, but I do have to question whether
we are really compelled to apply automatically this "nothing is
superior to anything else" concept everywhere, no matter how
difficult or inefficient a system appears to be.

It is clear to me that scripts arose through a centuries-long
evolutionary process, in which enhancements were gradually added.
The development of consonant-only syllabary (if I may call it that)
represented a major step in this process;  the Greek innovation
to add vowel letters to their alphabet represented another.
Both these cases, IMO, marked a definite objective improvement
over the older systems.  This is not to do not deny the fact
that the older systems were adequate;  I do claim however
it is possible to make relative utilitarian judgements
in certain areas.

Thanks for the food for thought.


Regards

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