Writing And Language

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Chapter 15 Writing And Language
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1 Type of Writing
1.1 Logographic Writing Chinese
1.2 Phonographic Writing
Syllabic writing Japanese Alphabetic writing English
2 The History of Writing
2.1 Pre-writing petroglyphs, clay tokens
2.2 Pictograms
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? Blissymbolics
Figure 1 Blissymbolics
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3    The Evolution of Writing
3.1  Rebuses and the Emergence of Writing
l   Rebus principle
3.2   Towards Syllabic Writing
l    Cuneiform
3.3 Another Middle Eastern Writing System Hieroglyphics
l    Hieroglyphics
l     Acrophonic principle
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3.4 The Emergence of Alphabets
l   The Greek alphabet
l   The Roman alphabet
3.5  Other Developments, East and West
l   Runic writing
l   Cyrillic script Glagolitic script Cyrillic alphabet
l    Two Semitic alphabets Arabic, Hebrew
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4    Some Non-European Writing Systems
4.1  Chinese Writing
l   Characters
l   Phonetic determinative
l    Radical
l    Pinyin
4.2  Japanese Writing
l     katakana and hiragana
l     kanji
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4.3  Korean Writing
l   Hangul
l   Hanja
4.4  American Scripts
l   Glyphs
4.5  Some African Scripts
4.6  Some Indian Scripts
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5  English Orthography
5.1 Irregularities
Table 1 Some problems with English orthography
Problem Examples
Some letters do not represent any segments in a particular word. though, sign, give, palm
A group of letters can be used to represent a single segment. think/?/,ship/?/, philosophy/f/
A single letter can represent a group of segments. saxophone/ks/, exile/gz/
The same letter can represent different segments in different words. bone/??/,one /w?/
The same segment can be represented by different letters in different words. /u/in rule, loop,soup, chew
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5.2 Obstacles to Reform
a. require a long and difficult period of transition
b. the dialectal variation found with English
Other considerations
a. The contemporary system often indicates derivational relationships among words.
1) music mjuzik musician mjuzi?-?n sign sajn signature s?gn-?t??r
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b. Morphological considerations are reflected in English
orthography in other ways as well.
1) mess lapse crass dense kiss house gloss mouse
2) plentiful, excel, repel baseball unwell spoonbill resell landfill recall
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3) carry carri-ed merry merri-ly marry marri-age candy candi-es beauty beauti-ful
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 6          Writing and Reading
l   People suffering from Brocas aphasia
l   The congenitally deaf
l   Children with normal hearing
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The End