Visible Speech (Questions)

Front 1

Is it necessary for a writing system to have a phonetic component? Or: Is a purely logographic or pictographic writing system possible?

Back 1

True writing represents sound. With only logograms and pictograms it would be impossible to indicate past tense, modal verbs, prepositions, and words like “the”, “that”, and “this” to specify objects.

Front 2

Does writing represent speech, or thought, or both, or neither?

Back 2

Robinson says writing is “a system of graphic symbols that can be used to convey any and all thought” referring to thought rather than speech. Writing does not convey thought; we think much more than we say; we think in language, but also in symbols, scenes (detailed or vague), pictures (faces), non-verbal sounds, and these are not what writing normally expresses or conveys. Writing represents speech (language as it is spoke).

Front 3

How do speech and writing differ?

Back 3

Writing is more permanent than speech. Writing is a system that captures speech; that means writing is dependent on speech. We often think of written texts as a higher form of language than speech. We wouldn’t write our everyday speech in our term papers—our shortened words, slang, abbreviations. Speech is hardwired in us as humans while writing is an invention.

Front 4

Discuss the following statement: Script is not language.

Back 4

A given script can be used to write a variety of languages. For example, most of the languages of Europe are written with the Roman script/alphabet; many other languages around the world are now written with the Roman alphabet. Another widespread script is used to write the Arabic language, but also Persian and Urdu, languages that are not related to Arabic, but to English.

Front 5

Why does Robinson say that all writing systems are compromises (between reflecting the details of pronunciations and depicting similarities of meaning in words)?

Back 5

The phonetic alphabet is so accurate that it represents even the accent of the original speaker; but this gain is offset by a consequent lack of readability. All scripts must strike a compromise between accuracy to the mouth and intelligibility to the mind. (page 37) Writing doesn’t perfectly represent a language.

Front 6

Why is it that no writing system reflects all of the phonetic features of a language?

Back 6

No writing captures every aspect of speech, but it represents speech accurately and consistently enough that everyone who has learned the system will interpret the same way. When we speak we often say some words higher on a musical scale than others, some syllables are said louder than others, and letters such as t, c, s and others make more than one sound. Representing all of these distinctions would overwhelm the system. Instead, in writing, we break speech down into units like words and syllables.

Front 7

In what way(s) are writing systems phonemic?

Back 7

because it uses a sound system, rather than meaning

Front 8

Does writing affect speech/language?

Back 8

- writing allows us to see how languages change over time
- From review session: cultures that have writing often have a “standard” dialect that is the only one written and that must be learned
- Writing sometimes changes pronunciation based on how a word is spelled
- Writing can cause the death of some dialects as speakers of those dialects choose to switch to the standard written dialect
- Writing probably sometimes slows language change

Front 9

Why is it sometimes said that English writing is partly logographic?

Back 9

all writing systems that are in use have a component of symbols that directly encode meaning. In English these symbols include &, 1,2,3, ?, $, %, etc.

Front 10

What is the difference between proto-writing and true writing? How does writing differ from drawing and that tells a story?

Back 10

Proto-writing is partial writing (i.e. ice age cave art, road sides, musical notations, tallies ); limited form of written communication. Best known form was pictography of North American Indians called petroglyphs. Real writing has rebus to express phonetic elements. Proto-writing does not follow the definition of writing but the logograms can be understood by most while pictures are not uniformly understood. In essence: pictures do not represent speech, but writing does.

Front 11

How often has writing been invented? Why not more often?

Back 11

- Three times, China, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica. Page 93 says that the egyptian writing may have been influenced by Mesopotamia because of proximity and trade, but also, the differences between egyptian heiroglyphs (logo consonantal) and mesopotamian cuneiform (logo syllabic) may indicate that they were produced independently
- The writing systems were created out of necessity, and the rise of cities, and other writing systems were influenced by the first three or four.

Front 12

What is the rebus principle (Robinson p. 42)

Back 12

Rebus writing is using a picture for the pronunciation rather than the meaning. Signs used in rebus writing must be language specific. Example: Eye Can Reed

Front 13

Did writing emerge in Mesopotamia “bit by bit” or “in one fell swoop”?

Back 13

We are unsure, but expert in early cuneiform writing and Mesopotamian culture P. Michalowski says, “the system was invented as a whole and did not develop gradually...the system as such was designed in one fell swoop.” Most experts on the matter agree.

Front 14

What is the relevance of the Mesopotamian clay tokens, according to Schmandt-Besserat?

Back 14

5 years ago, Denise Schmandt-Besseat of UT Austin proposed a new theory of the origin of writing. Small clay items, “tokens,” found across ANE, 8000-1500 BCE; fewer after 3000. Some of these are found in clay envelopes, “bullae”; She proposed they were part of a record-keeping system:
you live on a farm and you have 12 sheep you want to sell in the city. You can’t leave the farm, so you hire a middleman who isn’t family so you don’t trust him. The tokens are a record of how many sheep you sent him with.
Initially tokens were sealed inside a bulla , but this made it necessary to impress marks on the outside of the bulla so that the number of tokens could be checked en route.
Eventually people realized the inside tokens were unnecessary and the bullae flattened out into tablets
problems with the theory: tokens don’t match up all the time, tokens have some signs that don’t match up, tokens that should be the most numerous aren’t, and tokens were found spread throughout the near East but wri

Front 15

How do we know that Mesopotamian proto-cuneiform represents Sumerian?

Back 15

- The Sumerians lived in the area, and because of the rebus principle. It’s also more difficult to write it in Akkadian versus cuneiform .(?)

Front 16

Why did writing arise in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China?

Back 16

Economies grew more complex so there was reason for record keeping and accounting.

Front 17

How do logosyllabic writing systems work?

Back 17

- they begin with pictures/pictograms
- they use a lot of word signs=logograms in addition to phonetic signs
- the phonetic signs are all syllabic, not alphabetic

Front 18

How do we know how to pronounce Sumerian?

Back 18

- “Certain Sumerian cuneiform signs began to be used to represent phonetic syllables in order to write the unrelated Akkadian language, whose pronunciation is known from being a member of the Semitic language family. We have a lot of phonetically written Akkadian starting from the time of Sargon the Great (2300 B.C.). These phonetic syllable signs also occur as glosses indicating the pronunciation of Sumerian words in the lexical lists from the Old Babylonian period. This gives us the pronunciation of most Sumerian words. Admittedly the 20th century saw scholars revise their initial pronunciation of some signs and names, a situation that was not helped by the polyphony of many Sumerian ideographs. To the extent that Sumerian uses the same sounds as Semitic Akkadian, then, we know how Sumerian was pronounced.“
-http://www.sumerian.org/sumerfaq.htm#s19

Front 19

What is the significance of Mesopotamian “lexical lists”?

Back 19

- allows us to decipher Sumerian
- they were educational texts; shows that from the time writing was invented, education of the writing system began

Front 20

What is the earliest Chinese writing?

Back 20

The earliest certain Chinese texts are the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty; beginning in the 14th c BCE, these are written on bones, esp. the should bones of cattle, and on the plastrons of turtles, but also on other media as well. Many oracle bone inscriptions attempt to foretell the future: divination texts.

Front 21

Why has romanization not caught on in China?

Back 21

Pride in such a venerable system — unique, specific to Chinese, and very old; partly because of the close association of morpheme and signs: makes it difficult even to conceive of writing Chinese any other way. It is prestigious and shows they are very educated.

Front 22

What features do the first writing systems have in common?

Back 22

- began with pictographic representations
- use semantic or word signs, logographs
- semantic sings, or logograms, sometimes denote the object depicted, sun as ‘sun’, but sometimes denote related semantic concepts, such as ‘bright’ or ‘day’
- have signs in which a part of an object—often the head of a domesticated animal—represents the whole
compound logograms, such as cuneiform <mouth> for ‘eat’ or Chinese <man> for ‘rest’
- when a sign has a phonetic value, that value is syllabic, not a simple phoneme

Front 23

What happens when a script is borrowed to represent another language?

Back 23

writing depends on language and we would suffer a severe handicap if we decided to write English entirely in the Arabic script or in Japanese ‘kana’, because there are many sounds in English not represented in these scripts.

Front 24

In what ways are Japanese and Akkadian writing similar?

Back 24

Familiarity with Chinese is essential for Japanese and knowledge of Sumerian is essential for Akkadian.

Front 25

What is the significance of the face that Japanese writing uses kanji for nouns and verbs, and kana for grammatical elements?

Back 25

Homophony is a barrier in Japanese writing when only using Kana, so Kanji clears that up.

Front 26

Why did Akkadian scribes continue to use logograms? Why do Japanese writers use kanji?

Back 26

Japanese writers use kanji because it is perceived to be the masculine way of writing; whereas kana are still associated with women’s and young people’s writing. People like kanji.

Front 27

Discuss the claim that Japanese kana may be at least as efficient as an alphabet?

Back 27

The kana are good at representing the sounds of Japanese, since the vast majority of Japanese syllables are of the form consonant-vowel (CV) that most of the kana represent. (Examples: ka, ke, ki, ko, ku... ma, me, mi...) There aren’t really any redundant symbols in either of the kana syllabaries (hiragana or katakana) unlike in our alphabet (e.g., c, q, x).

Front 28

Which was first, Egyptian or Mesopotamian writing?

Back 28

It has been thought that the stimulus for creating the system came from Mesopotamia, but increased evidence for early Mesopotamian and Egypt writing has made is more difficult to assess which was invented first and whether one depended on the other.

Front 29

Why can we refer to Egyptian hieroglyphic writing as logoconsonantal?

Back 29

There are lots of word-signs, logograms.

Front 30

Why do Egyptian and in some Semitic languages not write vowels as regularly as we do in English?

Back 30

- They simply don’t need to. They rely more on context to supply the vowels.
- Additionally, in Semitic languages the concept of a (usually) three-letter consonantal “root” is an important indicator of word meaning. An example in modern Arabic: k-t-b is the root for words having to do with writing or books-- these words would just have different vowels, as in “kitaab”

Front 31

The Mesopotamian cuneiform writing system and the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system both include signs that are used as determinatives, that is, as semantic classifiers (“this word is a kind of plant”; “this word is a woman’s name”). Most Chinese characters include a semantic component as well as a phonetic one (“water” + “sounds like sheep” = “ocean”). Why do these systems include such signs, which are not part of the spoken language that the writing system is representing? What do they tell us about the way(s) people classify objects and actions?

Back 31

- a lot of words in these languages are homophones (using the rebus principle), so they use determinatives to clarify what the words might mean

Front 32

What is the relationship between numeral signs (“1”, “2”, etc.) and writing in general? Why do we usually write numbers with numeral signs rather than spelling them out (“one”, “two”, etc.)?

Back 32

- “1” is a logogram, “one” is phonetic; it’s quicker to write logograms

Front 33

Why do we still use Roman numerals? What do we use them for?

Back 33

Roman numerals retain a prestige not accorded to Arabic numerals. We still use them today on coinage, clock faces, certain public inscriptions, on the bindings of some learned journals, and even on the credits for television programmes made by the BBC. It would be quite unacceptable to write Louis 16 or Queen Elizabeth 2, or the Big Ben should display ordinary Arabic numerals. (pg 46)

Front 34

What is the acrophonic principle?

Back 34

- Acrophonic principle- each sound is represented by a picture of an object whose name begins with that sound
- if we were to write English with an apple for “a”, a ball for “b”, a cat for “c”, a dog for “d” and so on until each sound was accounted.

Front 35

In what way, and why, was the earliest Semitic alphabet based on Egyptian hieroglyphic writing?

Back 35

The Semitic alphabet was based on Egyptian hieroglyphic because it uses the acrophonic principle. The Semitic words for objects depicted by the pictographs, and, therefore, the sounds denoted by those pictographs

Front 36

What is the significance of the names of the letters in the earliest Semitic alphabet?

Back 36

-

Front 37

Why do you think the letters of the earliest Semitic alphabet had the order they did?

Back 37

-

Front 38

Is the invention of the alphabet revolutionary?

Back 38

-

Front 39

Did Greek revolutionize writing by using some letters for vowels?

Back 39

-

Front 40

What is the importance of Etruscan?

Back 40

- They were the middlemen between Greek and our modern-day Latin alphabet.

Front 41

Why has the alphabet spread so successfully?

Back 41

-

Front 42

“Alphabet follows religion”: discuss.

Back 42

-

Front 43

What is the significance of the Phoenician alphabet?

Back 43

Most alphabets are derived from the 22 letter Phoenician alphabet.

Front 44

Why do the letters of our alphabet appear in the order they do?

Back 44

-

Front 45

Why does the letter <j> have different phonetic values in English, French, German, and Spanish?

Back 45

“English, French, German, and Spanish all have the letter <J>, inherited from medieval Latin script; but that letter now has a very different phonetic value in the writing systems of each of those languages, because of sound changes that have occurred in those languages” -Lecture notes 7a

Front 46

Why are most African languages written with the Latin alphabet?

Back 46

- “This is a result of a combination of factors: alphabet following religion and army and navy (colonial European rule); In 1848, the Church Missionary Society of England published a pamphlet” promoting the use of the Latin alphabet to write indigenous languages. “The goal, of course, was to be able to write the Bible in local languages.” - Lecture notes 7a

Front 47

How did Aramaic writing spread?

Back 47

The extent of Aramaeans and of Aramaic language was about 1000-500 BCE. Like the Phoenicians the Aramaeans traded and moved around a great deal. Also the Persian empire used the language under Cyrus and his successors.

Front 48

In what ways did Brahmi differ from Aramaic?

Back 48

Brahmi script was the Ashoka pillar text. Aramaic was thought to have inspired this writing. In Brahmi every sign represents a syllable; the basic form of the letter has a default vowel. Also Brahmi indicated vowel modifications; this system is called a syllabic alphabet, also called alphasyllabary or akshara. The symbols are all similar, but they have small modifications by adding diacritics. Brahmi has consonant clusters which added ligatures to their writing.

Front 49

What is significant about the order of letters in Devanagari?

Back 49

They are arranged according to their phonetic value, depending on how the sounds they represent are produced. This reflects its creators’ (whose?) detailed knowledge of phonetics

Front 50

How does Brahmi illustrate both the innovative and the conservative aspects of writing systems?

Back 50

“Although Aramaic was undoubtedly the inspiration for the creation of the new writing, the Brahmi writing system worked very differently from Semitic consonantal systems... There are, of course, signs for the consonants. BUT, the signs do not represent the consonants only; they represent consonants plus an inherent short vowel, a; so the basic signs are syllabic by default... This was a major innovation... Second, a vowel other than the “default” vowel a was indicated by a modification of the basic form of the letter (like a diacritic)... this too is a major innovation: all vowels can be indicated” -Lecture notes 7b