Writing Systems (Languages And Linguistics)

This article focuses on a linked pair of " documents " from mid-seventeenth-century coastal Peru. The analysis first examines a revisita (an administrative " revisit ") carried out in 1670 in settlements around the town of San Pedro de Corongo, in the lower Santa River Valley. The revisit describes a census of the population of what are described as six pachacas (" one-hundreds ") administrative/census units that usually coincided with ayllus (the Andean clanlike sociopolitical groups). The document identifies 132 tributaries distributed across the six ayllus, all but two of whom are identified by name. Tribute is assessed on this new census count. The information in the revisit is then compared to the organization of a group of six khipus (knotted-string recording devices) that were said to have been recovered from a burial in the Santa Valley. The six khipus are organized into a total of 133 color-coded groups of six cords. The knot values on the first cords of the six-cord groups total the same value as the tribute assessed in the revisit document, and it is argued on these grounds that the khipus and the revisit document pertain to the same administrative procedure. The attachment knots of the first cords of the six-cord groups vary in a binary fashion by attachment type (i.e., tied either " verso " or " recto "). It is argued that this construction feature divides the tributaries identified in the revisit into moieties; therefore, the khipus constitute a gloss on the social organization of the population identified in the revisit document. It is suggested that the names of the tributaries may be signed by color coding in the khipus.

This is three way to learn how to write with the Afáka syllabary. Syllables don't have exactly the same translation for each of this charts. Its depends of the mother tongue and the interpretation of the author.

According to the research of André Pakosie

The relation between Chinese cultural identity and the use of Chinese characters is frequently discussed by historians of China. The study of Dungan cultural identity is crucial to this issue, especially since the Dungan language (Dōnggānyǔ) comprises a number of Northern Chinese "Mandarin" dialects spoken by a mixed population with a strong unified sense of a local Chinese cultural identity all of its own. The primacy of speech versus writing is a central theme in general linguistics. Here again, the case of Dungan cyrillic pinyin versus Chinese character literacy provides absolutely crucial evidence of a unique case in which the spoken language of a highly literate Chinese population is profoundly affected by a radical change of writing system. In separating themselves from the traditional Chinese writing system and the traditional literature transmitted in that medium, the Dungan people provide unique evidence that the generally accepted thesis on the primacy of spoken versus written language is profoundly flawed: Dungan independence from the traditional Chinese writing system had profound and pervasive effects on the use of so-called shūmiànyǔ vocabulary, of traditional colloquial proverbs on the one hand, and very importantly on the use of chéngyǔ and yànyǔ which is so widespread within those Chinese communities in which the use of Chinese characters continues to prevail. Yuen Ren Chao is said to have complained that speakers of Mandarin Chinese were trying to speak shūmiànyǔ. It seems to me to be profoundly significant that no such complaint could ever be made of the Dungans speaking their language. The status of the written language is not the same as that in the case of Standard Mandarin Chinese. The abandonment of Chinese characters to supplement the Korean hangul alphabet has had closely similar profound gradual effects on the usability and comprehensibility of a wide range of Chinese loan words and classical Chinese proverbial idioms of all kinds in modern Korean. The foreign language of reference is no longer classical Chinese. It is English. Again, when it comes to the comparative study of the cultural and even political implications of writing systems, the case of the Dungans can be very usefully compared with that of a

From its first adoption of writing at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, ancient Cyprus was home to distinctive scripts and writing habits, often setting it apart from other areas of the Mediterranean and Near East. This well-illustrated volume is the first to explore the development and importance of Cypriot writing over a period of more than 1,500 years in the second and first millennia BC. Five themed chapters deal with issues ranging from the acquisition of literacy and the adaptation of new writing systems to the visibility of writing and its role in the marking of identities. The agency of Cypriots in shaping the island's literate landscape is given prominence, and an extended consideration of the social context of writing leads to new insights on Cypriot scripts and their users. Cyprus provides a stimulating case to demonstrate the importance of contextualised approaches to the development of writing systems.

Chapter 1 available with open access here: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/284465

There is no comparable survey written by a top specialist with the purpose of revealing structural similarities in language encoding by
writing systems and dispelling several key misconceptions along the way. Its conclusions are thought-provoking and consequential. This book is a must-have, although its actual audience is somewhat narrower than
intended. As a course textbook, however, it requires contextualization and extra readings

This paper focuses on three language systems: the Greek, the English and the German languages, which we will examine as to their transparency. This contrastive analysis was undertaken in the context of my doctoral research with the subject "Teaching spelling to learners with dyslexia learning German as a second foreign language in primary education" (Tsakalidou, 2020). These language systems were analysed in detail, due to the fact that we examined the spelling difficulties of learners with dyslexia and created the theoretical framework as to the three languages involved in the research. The learners, who took part in this research (95 learners between the ages of 10 and 11 years, 20 of who had dyslexia), had Greek as their first (mother) language, English as their first foreign language and German as their second foreign language. Research of various language systems has shown that dyslexia is recorded equally in all language systems, however, the difficulties that dyslexic learners face are increased in opaque orthographic systems (for example English).

In this article, see pages 164, 166-168 for Stuart's discussion of the Grolier Codex.  It is highly significant that the Mexican State of Chiapas and the Universidad Autonoma de Chiapas chose to include the Grolier Codex as an authentic ancient Maya book in 1985 and make a fine color facsimile available along with the Dresden, Paris, and Madrid codices for further research. 

This review and essay of "Los Codices Mayas" is being posted as a personal tribute to my friend and colleague, the late George E. Stuart, Ph.D. (1935 - 2014) for his great generosity and many extraordinary contributions promoting world archaeology over several generations.

This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Maya Grolier Codex.

Variation in writing is highly frequent at both the visual and the functional levels. However, as of yet, the associated notion of allography has not been systematically described. In this article, two major types of allography are proposed: graphetic allography, conceptually comparable to allophony, depends on visual similarity and captures how concrete units are associated with visual abstractions, i.e., how three graphs in <cabana> are instances of the basic shape |a|. Graphematic allography, conceptually closer to allomorphy, does not depend on visual similarity but groups together units that share the same function, i.e., represent the same linguistic unit (phoneme, syllable, morpheme, etc.) and are complementarily distributed, meaning there exist no contexts in which they contrast. An example is the positionally conditioned alternation between |σ| vs |ς| for the Greek grapheme <σ>. By means of a number of criteria, subtypes of graphetic and graphematic allography are proposed and examples are given from different writing systems. A special case that is discussed is the complex phenomenon of capitalization. Additionally, examples of variation phenomena that are not included in the concept of allography are given, and orthographic variation is addressed as a marginal case of variation dependent on the norm rather than the system.

Naturalness Theory (NT) is founded on the notion of naturalness and claims that when a linguistic phenomenon can be processed by humans with little effort, both sensomotorically and cognitively, it is deemed more natural compared to other, more complex phenomena. Drawing on evidence such as language change, language acquisition, and language disorders, various parameters of naturalness (e.g., biuniqueness, constructional iconicity) have been postulated, which focus on the phonological and morphological subsystems of language. This paper offers an outline of how naturalness can be extended to grapholinguistic phenomena. Comparative graphematics (cf. Weingarten 2011), extended to comparative grapholinguistics, is assessed as a method that can be used to reveal naturalness parameters which apply to both material (graphetic) and linguistic (graphematic) aspects of writing. The reduction of extrinsic symmetry across various scripts will be discussed as an example. By integrating these preliminary theoretical ideas into the framework of NT, it is demonstrated that so-called Natural Grapholinguistics could offer promising new insights as well as a tertium comparationis method for future comparative analyses of scripts and writing systems.

Map of Writing systems of the First Civilizations of the World.

I would like to thank Timofey M. Mets, Ilya S. Yakubovich, Alexey K. Lyavdansky and Michael Bělonosov (for fonts).

PNG files archive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Aww_2gwthiAFyBsX6AugOuVF3zL7fqZ6?usp=sharing

In this study, I extended input methods for the Japanese language to Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are several systems that capable of inputting Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. However, they do not allow us to directly input hieroglyphs, for instance, into MS Word. The new Egyptian hieroglyphic input system being reported here, developed using technology used for inputting Japanese writing, is quite unique and allows the direct input of hieroglyphs, for example, into MS Word. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Japanese writing system (with its mixture of hiragana, katakana and kanji) share basic graphemic characteristics. For instance, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic logograms are functionally similar to Japanese kanji logograms (Chinese characters), whereas Egyptian hieroglyphic phonograms are functionally similar to Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabic phonograms. The input technology for Japanese makes it possible to input a mixture of logograms and phonograms, and phonetic complements. This technology is a well-organized and handy tool to input Japanese writing into computers, having been used by over 100 million people. I applied this technology to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic inputting and created a new intuitive hieroglyphic inputting system using Google Japanese Input. Using this method, anyone can directly write Egyptian hieroglyphic writing into software like MS Word. If the transcription of an ancient Egyptian word is entered, the correct hieroglyphs are generated by this system. If there are multiple options for any phonemic combinations that use other combinations of phonetic complements or determinatives, a dropdown window with a list of several combinations of glyphs appears and the user can choose the desired combination.

In response to Unger (2014), I argue that Chinese does not merely lie along one end of an undifferentiated continuum of writing systems plotted according to the degree of phonological representation found in its graphs. Rather, two features of Chinese writing make it categorically distinct from even orthographically “deep” alphabetic writing systems like English: (1) the high prevalence of graphs that represent distinct meaningful linguistic units (i.e. morphemes) and (2) the use of graphic components (variously termed significs, determinatives, taxograms, classifiers, radicals) to represent the general semantic domains of those represented morphemes. These features have implications for how Chinese writing is processed in the brain, how it changes over time, and how it has been adapted for the written representation of other languages. For these reasons we should recognize that Chinese writing is distinct from phonographic systems of writing. Any dispute over which term is most appropriate for characterizing Chinese and the other writing systems of its type—logographic, morphographic, morphosyllabic, etc.—is secondary in importance to the recognition of the validity of this categorical distinction.

It has been repeatedly pointed out in the literature that the Old Japanese modal (past) auxiliary -kyer- has a ‘perfect’ homonym -k-yer-, which is a contraction of the auxiliary verb -ko- ‘come’ in the infinitive form followed by the stative auxiliary verb -ar- (-ki-ar- > -k-yer-) (Kinoshita et al. 2003: 259; Frellesvig 2010: 75–6; Vovin 2020: 879). As I have argued elsewhere (Kuznetsov 2021: 282–3), the two entities are in fact different stages of the same grammaticalisation path, with the ‘perfect’ usage diachronically preceding the modal (past) one. In this study, I examine how the two -k(-)yer- are used in the Man’yōshū and propose diagnostic environments where the modal (past) -kyer- can be distinguished from the ‘perfect’ -k-yer- (Section 2) and vice versa (Section 3). I also demonstrate that what has been previously referred to as the ‘perfect’ -k-yer- is actually a cluster of at least three different functions. In Section 4, I argue for a statistically significant correlation between the degree of grammaticalisation of a linguistic unit and the way it is spelt in the Man’yōshū. In Section 5, the results of this research are considered from a typological perspective.

* This research was supported by a grant from the Japan-Russia Youth Exchange Center (https://www.jrex.or.jp/).

The fourth known pre-Columbian Maya codex—the only one discovered in the 20th century—was found by looters in the mid-1960s. First exhibited in New York in 1971, what has come to be known as the Grolier Codex is half of a hybrid-style 20-page, 104-year Mesoamerican divinatory Venus Almanac. With new radiocarbon dates that place it in the 13th century CE, it is likely to be the oldest surviving book on paper from the Americas as well as the only ancient Maya codex now residing in Mexico. Although most Mayanists have accepted it as authentic, based in part on the author’s 40 years of research,* it remains an unacknowledged Mexican national treasure as it has never been officially recognized except in the State of Chiapas. Mesoamerican Venus Almanacs were widely used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to regulate practices of sacred warfare and ritual sacrifice, the goal of which was to obtain captives whose blood was shed to invoke the personified forces of rain and fertility. The Grolier Codex offers unique images of 10 of the 20 manifestations of Venus (named in the Maya Dresden Codex), greatly enriching our knowledge of these traditions documented in four other pre-Columbian codices as well as numerous archaeological and ethnohistoric sources. This article is a summary of the talk given on November 7, 2014 to the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington DC and includes a brief history of accounts of the discovery of the Grolier Codex and allegedly associated artifacts; photographic history; outlines the author’s comprehensive program of research, including several new scientific discoveries leading to an interpretation of the Codex—based on the Dresden Codex and other sources; and offers a new Latinized name that recognizes that the “Codex Mayano-Mexicanus” is an authentic ancient book deriving from the Maya culture and now properly residing in Mexico.

          *See <http://umd.academia.edu/JohnBCarlson>.

Also utilized as part of the November 7, 2014 talk are TWO 1983 historical STUDY GUIDE documents which can be viewed at the following academia.edu links:

• GROLIER CODEX Page Study Guide: Pages 1-9 and Reconstructed Page 10/11 (1983): 

https://www.academia.edu/7911420/GROLIER_CODEX_Page_Study_Guide_Pages_1-9_and_Reconstructed_Page_10_11

• GROLIER CODEX Comparative Study Guide (1983): Grolier pages 1-9 and reconstructed page 10/11 with Maya Dresden Codex Venus Almanac page numbers 48/1 – 50/2 with Venus Station and Directional Associations; Names (on Dresden Rows 17 & 22) of the associated Venus Impersonators; and Initial (1983) interpretations of the Grolier Codex scenes & iconographic interpretations. Over the three decades since 1983, some of the glyphic and iconographic interpretations have changed, as discussed in the presentation. The details are in press:

https://www.academia.edu/9208071/GROLIER_CODEX_Comparative_Study_Guide_1983_

*****

This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Maya Grolier Codex.

Writing is an eclectic phenomenon whose many facets are studied by the young interdisciplinary field of grapholinguistics. Linguistically, writing is a system of graphic marks that relate to language. Under the lens of processing, it is a method of producing and perceiving utterances with our hands, eyes, and brains. And from a communication theoretical and sociolinguistic perspective, it is an utterly personal medium that allows users not only to convey messages to others but also to associate themselves with cultures or ideologies. These perspectives must merge to become the foundation of a functional theory of grapholinguistics that aims not only to describe how writing systems are built but to explain why they are built that way. Starting with a unified framework that allows the description of all types of writing systems with comparative concepts (such as grapheme) and moving towards the incorporation of evidence from disciplines such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to arrive at explanations, this book establishes the cornerstones of such a functional theory of writing. The Nature of Writing is a collection of ideas about writing, a status report about relevant research, a discovery of desiderata, and a new perspective. It is a start, but most importantly, it is an invitation.

The fourth known pre-Columbian Maya codex, the only one discovered in the twentieth century, was found by looters in the mid-1960s. First exhibited in New York in 1971, what has come to be known as the  Grolier Codex is half of a 20-page, 104-year divinatory hybrid-style Mesoamerican Venus Almanac, probably the physically oldest surviving pre-Columbian book, and with new radiocarbon dates that place it in the thirteenth century CE. It is likely to be the oldest surviving book on paper from the Americas as well as the only ancient Maya codex now residing in Mexico. Although most Mayanists have accepted it as authentic, based in part on the author’s 40 years of research, it remains an unacknowledged Mexican national treasure, as it has never been officially recognized. Mesoamerican Venus Almanacs were widely used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to regulate practices of sacred warfare, the goal of which was to obtain captives for sacrifice, their blood shed to invoke the personified forces of rain and fertility. The  Codex offers unique images of 10 of the 20 manifestations of Venus, greatly enriching our knowledge of these traditions. The present study offers a brief history of accounts of the discovery of the Codex and allegedly associated artifacts; presents a documented photographic history; outlines the author’s comprehensive program of research, including several new scientific discoveries; and offers a new Latinized name that recognizes that the Codex Mayano-Mexicanus is an authentic ancient book deriving from the Maya culture and now properly residing in Mexico.


*****
This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Maya Grolier Codex.

This study of the hieroglyphic writing system of Preclassic and Classic Monte Alban in the Mexican state of Oaxaca discusses the origins of writing in the Zapotec area and highlights the various academic perspectives (above all, those of Alfonso Caso, Gordon Whittaker, Joyce Marcus) with regard to aspects of this system.  In so doing, it provides a much-needed corrective to the work of Marcus, which unfortunately fails to give credit to such scholars as Robert Barlow and Whittaker, while frequently, but silently, incorporating their ideas.

The recent excellent work of Javier Urcid on the iconography of Zapotec Monte Alban deals tangentially with some aspects of hieroglyphic writing, primarily the calendrical system, as well, but is most concerned with Classic-period monuments. His work postdates this article.

تشير نظرية أنظمة الكتابة التي نشأت في نهايات القرن التاسع عشر، وطورها Gelb وغيره من اللغويين والدارسين في هذا الحقل العلمي إلى تصنيفات مختلفة ثنائية وثلاثية وأكثر. وتعتمد – ككل الدراسات التصنيفية اللاحقة – على جوهر العلاقة بين الصوت وتمثله الكتابي حرفاً أو رمزاً. ومن هنا تأسست التصنيفات المعتمدة على وجود العلاقة الصوتية-الحرفية في الأساس كالكتابة الألفبائية والكتابة المقطعية على اختلاف أنواعهما، أو على انعدام تلك العلاقة الصوتية-الحرفية كالكتابة الصورية Pictography والشعارية Logography. وفي ظل التشتت الكبير الذي يعاني منه هذا الحقل مما يجعل البحث في العلائق والعوائق بين تلك الأنظمة الكتابية في العالم مهمة صعبة، فإن الحاجة إلى تصنيف علمي معتمد لأنظمة الكتابة يبدو ملحاً.
يضم نظام الكتابة العربية - ككل الأنظمة الساميّة – غَناء في تمثيل الصوامت وفقراً في تمثيل الصوائت. ومن هنا فقد اختلف عدد من الدارسين لأنظمة الكتابة في تصنيف الكتابة العربية، وتأسيس ذلك التصنيف منطقياً على أساس علمي. ووصل ذلك الاختلاف إلى أن أطلقت الأدبيات المهتمة بأنظمة الكتابة عدداً من الأوصاف المختلفة على نظام الكتابة العربية ومنها: الكتابة المقطعية، والكتابة الهجائية، والأبجدية، والصوامتية... إلى غيرها من الأوصاف والتصنيفات والتعريفات. بل ذكر بعضهم عجزاً خاصاً بالنظام الكتابي العربي والساميّ يحول دون تصنيفه. وكانت مهمة هذا المبحث مراجعة أهم تلك الأوصاف في مقابل الخصائص الصوتية والصورية (الكتابية) لنظام الكتابة العربية.
بعد فحص دقيق للمحاولات التصنيفية لنظام الكتابة العربية، وجدنا أن أفضل توصيف لنظام الكتابة العربية هو النظام الأبجدي بمعناه التقني الصوامتي في علم أنظمة الكتابة كما شرحناها في هذا المبحث، لأسباب متعددة كتطور الخط الكتابي، والخصائص الإملائية، وجذور الكلمات، وتركيب الأحرف وأشكالها وتغيراتها، بالإضافة إلى العلاقة الصوتية-الحرفية في هذا النظام الكتابي العريق.

Details of a lecture give at an International Lettering Arts Conference in 2013 about a unique alphabet invented by two young men from the Fulani Tribe of Guinea. With their tribe over 90% illiterate, they set out to create a writing system that better represented the sounds of their speech. From its creation, this alphabetic writing system has made great strides in literacy for their tribe, and has been set up for a Unicode release in 2016.

During the last two millennia, a large corpus of texts was produced in the Ethiopic script. This ancient African writing system is peculiar to the Ethio-Eritrean region at the Horn of Africa, particularly to the Ethiosemitic language Gǝʿǝz. The present paper is concerned with the origin, linguistic modification and spread of the Ethiopic script, as well as its socio-cultural connotation vis-à-vis other scripts in the region. For this purpose, previous studies related to these topics have been assessed and summarized in a comprehensive description.

The presence of Italo-Romance local languages on the Web, and particularly on social networks, compels local language promoters to create (or to choose one of the pre-existing) writing systems for these traditionally and eminently spoken-only varieties.
As for Lombardy (north-western Italy), a proper regional koinè never existed, nor existed a unitary supra-regional script (Sanga 1999). Nonetheless, on the Internet Lombard is one of the most used Italian regional varieties (Tavosanis 2011, Miola 2014) and on the Lombard webpages several different orthographies may be found: among them, the milanesa classega (Classical Milanese orthography), the urtugrafia muderna (modern orthography), the insübrica ünificada (unified Insubric orthography, with Insubric being an ad-hoc sovra-local variety elaborated for online uses), the orthography called Scriver Lombard.
This paper will investigate in depth the scripts used on the Wester Lombard wikipedia (http://lmo.wikipedia.org/) and for posting on the Facebook open group Per quei che parla milanes (‘For those who speak Milanese’, http://www.facebook.com/groups/273487396077585/, recently renamed Per quei che parla lombard, ‘For those who speak Lombard’).
After discussing these scripts along the lines of Iannàccaro and Dell'Aquila’s (2008) framework for sociolinguistic analysis of graphic systems, I will, at least tentatively, answer the following questions:
a) which script(s) are preferred by Lombard internet users on their dialect webpages?
b) Are top-down graphic revisions or editings imposed on these webpages?
c) Which role the writing systems of contact languages and of real or “desired” Dachsprachen play in this connection?

In East Asia, the relationship between script and language is determined to a great extent by the typological character of the languages involved. This is particularly so because sinographic writing generally relies on the syllable as the smallest unit of sound expressible. However, many languages that have adapted Sinitic writing throughout history display complex syllable structure not easily expressible by the monosyllabically inclined sinograph. Moreover, some languages have even displayed changing syllable structure throughout documented history. This article examines the so-called "monosyllabicization" of the Vietnamese language, and its impact on the history of the sinographic vernacular script known as Chữ Nôm. I argue that by the 17th century, the emergent monosyllabic character of Vietnamese was remarked upon by elites as a new justification for embracing vernacular writing, previously considered uncouth.

تأخر اللسانيون كثيراً في الاهتمام بالكتابة بوصفها نتاجاً لغوياً مقابلا للكلام. ورغم النقاش الذي حظيت به بعض الأدبيات في كون الكتابة ناتجاً أصيلاً أو فرعياً عن نظام اللغة المجرد، فإن الدراسة اللغوية للكتابة لم تبلغ مداها حتى نشأت نظرية أنظمة الكتابة. وتعرض هذه الدراسة الإطار النظري لأنظمة الكتابة، ومقارباتها التصنيفية، في محاولة لسبر الإشكالية التصنيفية ومقارباتها المختلفة واصطلاحاتها العلمية. ثم تناقش بناء على ذلك تفصيلياً أهم المقاربات التصنيفية وأكثرها تأثيراً في هذا المجال، وتنعم النظر في الفرضيات التي أدت إلى ظهور التصنيفات المختلفة، وتحاول رسم معالم الإشكالية التصنيفية التي تسيطر على البحوث التي تناولت هذا الشأن وميلانها أحياناً إلى الاضطراب والتنازع.
لقد حاولتْ هذه الدراسة تشكيل أطروحة تصنيفية بناء على الإطار النظري، آخذة بالاعتبار ما اتفق عليه الباحثون وما أشار إليه المحققون الكبار في هذا الحقل من تصنيفات تستحق الذكْر. وخرجت الدراسة بتصنيف ذي سبعة أنواع للأنظمة الكتابية هي: الكتابة الشعارية، والمقطعية، والصائتية، وأبو جيدا، والأبجدية، والألفبائية، والكتابة المخصصة. ولكل منها تعريف محدد وأمثلة مشتهرة، مدعومة بعدد من الأشكال التوضيحية. ولعل في هذه المحاولة ما يسمح بوضع الحل الأكمل حتى الآن من وجهة نظر الباحث، من حيث اشتمالها على ما توافقت عليه المقاربات المختلفة، بطريقة توازن بين التبسيط المخل والتعقيد المضل.

Only lately have linguists paid attention towards writing as
a linguistic representation parallel to speech. Despite the long
debate among specialists about whether writing is a primary
or secondary product of language, the linguistic study of writing
was not appealing to researchers until the theory of writing
system originated. This paper outlines the framework of writing
systems and approaches related to taxonomy, in an attempt to
examine this typological issue with its various approaches and
terminology. It also discusses in detail the most influential approaches
to the classification of writing systems and their underlying
assumptions.
On the basis of this theoretical framework, seven types of
writing systems are discussed, namely: logography, syllabary,
moraic, abjad, abugida, alphabet, and featural writing systems.
A definition of each one of these systems is then presented together
with examples and figures. It is hoped that this attempt,
being at the same time neither too complex nor superficial, will
contribute with a suitable answer to an issue which has given
some concern to researchers in this field.
Keywords: syllabary, moraic, abjad, abugida, alphabet.

This short communication is aimed at popularizing the puzzle of the undeciphered inscription engraved on a wall of the Baptistery of Pisa (Tuscany, Italy), which appears also in other religious monuments in Tuscany. The inscription is written in an unknown script and, being very short and without other examples with the same symbols all over the world (apart from some equivalent epigraphic documents from the same area), is still undeciphered. The goal of the following note, which absolutely does not aim to be original, and which is just recapitulative, is to trigger a discussion about the inscription and to encourage possible interpretations and, ultimately, new deciphering attempts.

An updated discussion and interpretation can be found here:

1) 

https://www.academia.edu/104257486/A_Puzzling_Religious_Inscription_from_Medieval_Tuscany_Symbology_and_Interpretation

2)

https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9252/3/3/15

This paper provides a detailed review of the principal assumptions, theoretical orientations, and working methodologies of archaeological decipherment, indicating how these perspectives have guided ongoing work in script comparison, stimulated investigations into the origins, development, and demise of writing systems, and served as a yardstick against which to measure proposed decipherments. The principles are then applied to Maya hieroglyphic writing in a detailed case study of the decipherment of the Maya phonetic sign /me/. The evidence in support of this particular decipherment measures up well against the aforementioned general principles, and is additionally supported by controlled contexts (sufficient in number and variety to allow testing), by the reconstructed grammatical rules and orthographic conventions of Classic Maya writing, and, not least, by the critical presence of biscripts and similar script-external constraints. Following determination of the sign’s function (a CV phonetic sign) and canonical reading value (me), its iconic origins are explored and determined to have arisen acrophonically from the Eastern Ch'olan term /mech/ “snail shell”. Contributions of this study include a nuanced analysis of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (a critical sixteenth-century biscript), the addition of several ‘new’ Classic Mayan lexemes and grammatical morphemes (including the /-em/ perfect participle), and the recognition of conventionalized markings for ‘shell’ in Maya and wider Mesoamerican art and writing. Most importantly, the study contributes to a broader theory and methodology of decipherment, and urges the application of comparative grammatological principles to the lesser-known scripts of Mesoamerica.

A discussion of the origins of Mesopotamian writing, from proto-cuneiform down through the development of the syllabary. In particular, the article presents an analysis of arguments presented by proto-cuneiform specialist Robert Englund and myself for a non-Sumerian, non-Semitic language in Uruk-period Southern Mesopotamia.
    It is argued that an early Indo-European-speaking community shared the multilinguistic landscape and had a decisive role in the early development of writing. It should be noted that the article does not suggest that Englund endorses these arguments, but rather demonstrates that his ideas are compatible with them.

The Hebrew Writing System in Contact

The study of Languages in Contact is synonymous with Contact Linguistics and needs today no excuse, but the study of writing systems in contact is still neglected. Given that “writing is not language” (Saussure 1916), contact linguistics and contact graphemics are not synonymous but merely private cases of contact semiotics.

The history of Hebrew writing spans over three millennia. Its condition, evolution and function are often determined by contact-induced transfer and integration. A survey and analyses of graphemic contact addresses themes such as the Phoenician origin of the Hebrew alphabet with its inherent polyphony; acquisition of new Aramaic characters; archaizing usage of ancient Hebrew characters for identitarian purposes in both ancient Judea and modern Israel; appropriation of Greek alphabetic counting and its linguistic impact and contact with Jewish language purposed writing systems. All have implications for the shape and function of the Hebrew writing system, which are at times anecdotal and at times permanent.

Description, analyses and critique employ notions such as xenography (foreign writing practice), graphemic transfer, (regional) Scriptura Franca (graphemic counterpart of Lingua Franca with no necessary overlap), foreign-induced graphophonemic under-differentiation, identitarian usage of writing, lexicalization of graphemic sequences, graphemic leveling, writing as language-generator agent, Jewish languages and writing systems, graphemics of Israeli Hebrew, dialectics of semiotic contact and integration. In spite of the jargon and in order to enhance accessibility, the presentation of evidence in the paper is often accompanied by tables, images and illustrations.

Most of the facts displayed in the present study are known to the scholarly community and thus offer no real novelty. The angle of approach, however, is broadly semiotic rather than narrowly linguistic. This study considers writing systems as an independent (though not isolated) field of research and should thus constitute a milestone in grammatology as a scholarly discipline.

http://aleph.nli.org.il:80/F/?func=direct&doc_number=000474190&local_base=RMB01

http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/listaarticulos?tipo_busqueda=ANUALIDAD&revista_busqueda=9671&clave_busqueda=2006

Основываясь на исследованиях по фонетике северокавказских языков, автор выявляет структурное несоответствие между исключительно богатым консонантизмом данных языков и их нынешними кириллическими алфавитами и, выдвигая идею о необходимости создания собственных и независимых систем письма для 37 западно- и восточнокавказских языков, находящихся под угрозой исчезновения, предлагает совершенно новую, оригинальную и обобщенную алфавитную систему, наделенную высшей степенью графемно-фонемной взаимооднозначности и основанную на принципах знакоформирования и морфологическом применении элементов графики трех исторических алфавитов Южного Кавказа и Армянского Нагорья.

Based on phonological research of 37 Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages, the author proposes for them an original and phonetically complete generalized featural alphabet shaped via peculiar usage of the morphological principles of construction of millennial South Caucasian alphabets. Unlike the phonetically inconsistent Cyrillic alphabets currently in use, it has exceptional properties for precise and alphabetically unequivocal rendition of all phonetic peculiarities of the North Caucasian languages which possess the largest consonant inventory among all languages of the world.

El presente texto se deriva de un proyecto de investigación que explora las relaciones entre cultura, lengua y escritura entre los otomíes de la época Prehispánica y el periodo Novohispano Temprano. Uno de los problemas que estoy tratando de resolver es determinar la naturaleza de la escritura pictórica del Centro de México. Este sistema de registro se encuentra justamente sobre la borrosa frontera entre las categorías semánticas europeas de la escritura y las artes plásticas. Los antiguos habitantes de Mesoamérica no hacían esta distinción; ambas categorías se fundían en una sola. Esto ha causado confusión y polémica entre los investigadores durante varios siglos.

(Capítulo publicado en Estudios acerca de las artes: análisis, técnicas y reflexión, Benjamín Valdivia, editor, Guanajuato, División de Arquitectura, Arte y Diseño, Universidad de Guanajuato/Azafrán y Cinabrio Ediciones, 2009, pp. 226-253.)

Le chercheur et membre du comité de grammaire à l’Académie de la Langue Hébraïque, M. Mordechay Mishor, a proposé récemment une réforme du nikoud. Dans une publication détaillée apparue dans le numéro de la revue Leshonenu La’am (2006) consacré à la question, Mishor propose d’adapter partiellement le nikoud à la phonologie de l’hébreu moderne. Il explique pourquoi c’est nécessaire et comment c’est faisable.
Dans le même numéro de la revue, on a invité quatre de ses collègues,
philologues et linguistes, à réagir à la motion de réforme de Mishor. Ils ont tous répondu par un NON catégorique. D’une manière qui rappelle le débat de l’orthographe en France, ces réactions négatives avancent des arguments souvent peu rationnels, voire émotionnels. Bien qu’un nombre non négligeable d’intellectuels soit favorable à une certaine adaptation du nikoud pour en refaire un outil accessible, les quatre érudits qui ont critiqué Mishor favorisent leurs vieilles habitudes au détriment des considérations qui relèvent des nécessités sociétales et semblent vouloir bloquer tout mouvement. À les lire, on a l’impression qu’il ne faut jamais toucher à quoi que ce soit dans le nikoud, et que la validité historique ou logique de leurs arguments leur importe peu.
Les arguments des opposants varient considérablement les uns des autres et on a l’impression que tous les moyens sont bons pour freiner tout changement. Ces arguments ont fait l’objet de réponses détaillées dans un article que j’ai publié11 dans la même revue. Puisque le débat se déroule entièrement en hébreu, quelques arguments d’opposition et leurs réponses sont présentés ici aux lecteurs qui ne sont pas encore hébréophones. Les noms des opposants ont été omis puisque l’important ici est le sujet et non pas les personnes, surtout lorsque celles-ci sont, à leur tour, critiquées.

http://aleph.nli.org.il:80/F/?func=direct&doc_number=000502698&local_base=RMB01

In this revised and extended version of the lecture I presented at the 64th RAI in Innsbruck 2018, I aim to apply modern invention theory to the early history of the alphabet. The modern theory illuminates, as we will see below, a few long-standing problems in the early life of the alphabet.

Abstract: While multilingualism in countries having many languages of recognized status, such as India which has 2 official languages (Hindi and English) and around 15 national languages, actually boosts the capacities of the learners attempting to acquire new languages, the sociolinguistic difference of status between Thai and local dialects of Thailand may explain the difficulty for Thai students to learn new languages and to switch languages. Thai being the predominant language of education is the written language and the medium through which Thai students learn their first grammar. Needless to say that, far from being only a tool for broader communication, Thai is the very tool of linguistic analysis for the students educated in the Thai system of education. Thai system of writing will thus be the conscious or unconscious tool for noting or memorizing other languages, while its grammatical categories, sometimes borrowed from other linguistic systems, will be the privileged medium in any further linguistic analysis when learning languages. The examples dealt with in this paper will be selected from some experiences of teaching and interacting with Phu Thai students studying French at Mahasarakham University.

Key Words: local languages of Thailand; Phu Thai; diglossia; code-switching; teaching a foreign language at the university level