Language and Orthography

Instructor: Tsueifen Chen

Spoken language vs. Written language

Spoken languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoken_language

Written languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_language

Spoken language

Spoken language is a form of human communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary (usually at least 10,000) together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into syntactically organized sentences and phrases.

Spoken language continues… Many spoken languages are written.

However, even today, there are many world languages that can be spoken but have no standard written form. Such languages can be expressed in writing using the

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Spoken language continues… Africa, Asia and the Pacific are the regions

where there are many small language groups, although there is also a large number of small indigenous groups in Latin America. Most of these small languages are not written. The same is true of some larger groups in Africa and Asia, numbering in a few cases more than one million speakers.(From http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-

URL_ID=28301&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)

Spoken language continues… Even from the point of view of syntax,

spoken language usually has its own set of grammatical patterns which sometimes may be quite different from that in written language.

e.g. I am loving it. (McDonald’s) I don’t see nobody. (I see nobody.) I don’t know nothing about it. (I know

nothing about it.)

Written language

A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages.

A written language exists only as a complement to a specific spoken or gestural language, and no natural language is purely written. However, extinct languages may be in effect purely written when only their writings survive. (explain extinct vs. dead language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language

Exercise: Differences between Spoken and Written language Group exercise—please discuss with your

group members and list some of the differences between spoken and written language.

http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-written-and-spoken-language/

Languages of the world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family

Languages in the world are mainly categorized as alphabetic, syllabic, or logographic-phonetic, according to the relationship between a script and the structure of its language (DeFrancis, 1989).

Languages of the world continue… Alphabetic languages: use letters to

represent sounds, not meaning. Syllabic languages: each character

represents a syllable. Logographic-phonetic (or morpho-

syllabic): each character represents a morpheme or semantic unit.

(From http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Writing_system )

What is alphabet?

An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes  — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language.

An alphabets are a phonemic system. Although this is commonly defined as a system that represent 'sounds', it really involve more abstract symbols that denote phonemes.

Alphabetic language continues… For instance, t, usually represents

the phoneme /t/ in English, and d usually represents the phoneme /d/.

The word tip has 3 phonemes /t/ /ı/ /p/.

‘What is alphabet’ continues… There are dozens of alphabets in use

today, the most common being Latin, deriving from the first true alphabet, Greek.

The Roman alphabet is the alphabet used for many modern-day languages. It came from the Greek alphabet. The earliest alphabet was in Egypt. It was first used to write Latin. Many languages are written with it today. It is also called the Latin alphabet.

Alphabetic language continues… A purely phonemic system would encode

phonological information fairly faithfully, rather than maintaining the structure or combinations of symbols to convey information or relationships involving word meanings. Systems that do just that are morphophonemic. The English alphabet is a morphophonemic system, in that though its letters (or graphemes) basically represent phonemes, these often do not change even when pronunciation differs in meaningfully related words.

From http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Writing_system

Examples of Alphabetic language English The modern English alphabet is a

Latin-based alphabet consisting of 26 letters. Of the 26 letters, 5 letters, a, e, i, o, u, represent vowels, and 21 letters represent consonants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet

Examples of Alphabetic language Finnish alphabetThe Finnish alphabet is based on the

Latin alphabet, and especially its Swedish extension. Officially it comprises 28 letters:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, X, Y, Z, Å, Ä, Ö

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_alphabet

Examples of alphabetic language continues… Russian alphabet

The modern Russian alphabet (русский алфавит) is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet and contains 33 letters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language

Syllabic language

What is syllabic language?

Ans. A writing system whose characters represent syllables is syllabic language.

A syllable consists of a vowel and at least one consonant, though various combinations are possible, including single vowels.

Examples of syllabic language The Japanese language is written with a

combination of three scripts: Chinese characters called kanji ( 漢字 ), and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana ( ひらがな or 平仮名 ) and katakana ( カタカナ or 片仮名 ).

Example of syllabic language continues… The Japanese language uses two

syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana (developed around AD 700). They are mainly used to write some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words, e.g. hotel is written with three kana, ホテル (ho-te-ru), in Japanese. Because Japanese uses many CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary

Morpho-syllabic language

What is a logographic language? What is morpho-syllabic language?Ans. A writing system whose symbols

represent morphemes or semantic units is logographic language.

Morpho-syllabic language continues… A logogram, or logograph, is a

grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language).

Most Chinese characters represent both a syllable and a morpheme, and thus the characters used to write languages such as Mandarin can be described as morphosyllabic.

Morpho-syllabic language continues…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Writing_system