Re: Pleremic? Kenemic? It's all Martian to me.

>Subject:      Re: Pleremic? Kenemic? It's all Martian to me.
>Status: RO
>
>Brian Betty wrote: "Raimundus A. Brown scripsit:"
>
>John C. wrote: "Actually, I wrote that."
>
>Oops! I'm sorry. I don't know how I lost track of who wrote who, since I
>just cut out stuff, but I guess I did. Sorry.
>
>"However, there is some phonetic information in Chinese writing, and not
>100% of Spanish writing is cenemic.  In particular, Arabic numbers are
>pleremic:  1 means "one", 2 means "two", etc."

This book is probably old news to most of us here, but I just bought it
last month and I love it. Check it out if you haven't!

Jerry   jlk@netcom.com


>
>                                Coulmas 1989
>
>Coulmas, Florian . 1989 . Writing systems of the world . Oxford, England ,
>Basil Blackwell, Ltd . 302 .
>
>Summary
>
>Discusses the disregard of writing prevalent in modern linguistics.
>Discusses the history and nature of writing, its relationship to the
>development of cultures and civilizations, and the functions of writing.
>Outlines the transition of writing from pictorial icons to phonetic
>symbols. Shows how writing represents speech and distinguishes between
>lexemic, morphemic, syllabic, and phonemic or phonetic levels. Assigns
>these levels to two types: the sense-determinative (meaningful) elements
>called "pleremic," and the sense-discriminative elements called "cenemic."
         ^^^^^^^
>Analyzes the merits and demerits of scripts of different levels. Discusses
>the writing systems of Egypt, China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Eastern and
>Western Semitic languages, and India. Discusses alphabetic systems
>beginning with the Greek alphabet. Refers to Smalley's (1964) five criteria
>for an optimal new writing system. Smalley prefers having a single
>representation for each phoneme of the language. However, recent reading
>research evidences that words and morphemes are the critical units for the
>proficient reader, whereas grapheme-phoneme correspondences seem to be of
>lesser importance (Ehri 1979; Frith 1979). History shows that alphabetic
>orthographies tend to move away from simple phonemic representation.
>Discusses treatment of homophones, and balance of the needs of the reader
>with the needs of the writer.

>
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>Questions? Contact Literacy@sil.org Last modified:November-25-97 15:23:57
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