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Lesson 3: Writing Systems

 

Definition:
A writing system is a way of visually representing language or verbal communication. It is a combination of a script and an orthography, and surrounding sets of rules regulating the use. Writing systems require a shared understanding between speakers/readers/users of the language to make sense of this visual instead of spoken use of language.
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Note: The exercises and worksheet are in English due to the specificities of the examples not having equivalent examples in German or Italian. This is due to the many exceptions that make English unique, and also highlights the inconsistencies that writing systems cannot capture or replicate in other languages.

Key Concepts

  • Script: Set of symbols (letters, characters) that represent linguistic units

  • Orthography: Rules relating letters to sound

  • Writing System: Combination of script and orthography by one language over time

Introduction

 

There exist many writing systems across the world, with some more familiar to those who can read this text: the alphabet. And some maybe less familiar: ones that use different scripts as Arabic, Japanese, Thai, and many more. However, there seems to be little universal tendencies among the writing systems except for the primacy of the syllable. This syllabic orientation has lead to a five-way typology of categorizing writing systems, consisting of:

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  • Logosyllabary/Morphosyllabary (Chinese, Japanese): Each character stands for a morpheme, where the characters can be used for the sound and the meaning.

  • Syllabary (Cherokee): Each character stands for a syllable.

  • Abjad (Arabic): Each character stands for a consonant.

  • Alphabet (Greek): Each character stands for a consonant or vowel.

  • Abugida (Sanskrit): Each character stands for a consonant accompanied by a vowel.

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In this lesson, we will focus on two types specifically: The alphabet and morphosyllabaries.

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UNIT 1: The Alphabet

The (English) alphabet is familiar to everyone reading this, but it is not the most convenient to start exploring alphabets. As everybody who has learnt English has come to know, English spelling and pronunciation is not the most consistent and logical. Writing systems are usually phonologically based, meaning each character should represent one corresponding sound. This may have been true back when these writing systems, in the case of Modern English 500+ and Chinese 2000+ years respectively, were established. But as language changes due to language contact, new words, innovations, etc., orthography often does not hold up anymore. English has a complicated orthography, this is due to the history of English being a mixture of its Anglo-Saxon and Latin origins, as well as influences by Irish missionaries, French conquerors, Viking invaders, and many more. Nearly all languages have been in contact with others and have thus changed, borrowed from others, and been influenced by others due to cultural exchanges.

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Due to English being the lingua franca of the contemporary world, languages that do not use the alphabet have an alphabet equivalent or have been “romanized”, so that they can be read by English speakers. However, writing systems, unlike languages, do not operate in the same way. Different writing systems relate to the sound system they record in fundamentally different ways. There have been attempts at standardized systems like the IPA with pronunciation, but each language maintains its own writing system.

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Note here that most of the choices, symbols, and shapes are arbitrarily chosen. If you think about the alphabet, there is no correlating sound in the sound system to capitalized and lowercase letters, so why is there even a distinction in the first place? Unlike language or communication, which a child cannot avoid learning, no child can simply learn to read or write by observing others – they need explicit instruction and guidance.

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This brings us to the fundamental point that language is primarily spoken and constantly changing, whereas written language is an attempt to physically document the fleeting nature of speech at a point in time. Writing has been seen as indispensable for civilization, but most human languages were never written down until recently and they were none the worse for it. This also begs the question whether languages need a written form, if we consider sign language or the more locally relevant dialect (not a language) Swiss German: Do both of these examples count as “languages” and do or should they hold the same “legitimacy” as English, German, or Italian? Ultimately writing is a way through which current cultures organize and administrate themselves.

 

Video Input: What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners

Activity: English spelling
Take the word 'ghoti' and discuss with a partner how you would pronounce it in English.

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Did you finish th exercise? If you take the 'gh' from 'enough' ('f' sound) The 'o' from 'women' ('ee' sound) And the 'ti' from 'nation' ('shuh' sound) the word 'ghoti' can be pronounced the same way as 'fish' Although most speakers of English would likely come to a solution similar to 'goaty' or 'goatee'.

As you can see from the activity above, English orthography and spelling is not the most consistent, as the letters could represent different sounds. Similar 'problems' can be seen with other alphabets, like the Greek alphabet. It consists of 24 letters still used today, but the problem lies in the lack of distinction in the treatment of them. By simply looking at the charcters, you can't tell the difference between vowels and consonants. There have been solutions to dealing with this problem: Either by simply ignoring it and continue spelling the same way, or to continually adjust the spelling to reflect the phonological reality of the language​
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In the case of English, there has not been any authorities imposing a change or a spelling reform since Modern English. The Modern English we speak and write is a consequence of the establishment of the printing press 500+ years ago, which set a standard for the English writing system, thus 'freezing' the grammar from back then. As a result, there are nowadays many inconsistent, adapted, and accepted spellings of the same words or meanings, thus creating what is commonly considered American and British spelling (e.g. color vs. colour, defense vs. defence, estrogen vs. oestrogen, etc.).​

Exercise: American and British spellings
 

You can work alone or in pairs for this exercise.
You can find the worksheet and key for this exercise below.

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UNIT 2: Other Writing Systems – Morphosyllabaries

Today, only one morphosyllabic script remains: Chinese, but in two very different writing systems. This writing system was established over 2,000 years ago and its characters consist of two components:

  • The Radical: gives a clue to the meaning,

  • The Phonetic: gives a clue to pronunciation.

 

However, as it usually happens with language, it changes over time, but the script and orthography did not. New characters were introduced and it is estimated that around 5,000 were adequate for most purposes. This has lead to attempts at a writing or script reform, resulting in around 2,000 characters that received “simplified” forms, which has become standardized and known as simplified Chinese. But not all of these simplified characters maintained the old component structure of radical and phonetic. Similarly, Japanese adopted the Chinese writing system and combined it with their own systems of kana, resulting in borrowed Chinese words and native Japanese words, with them having no relation between form and sound.

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Any kind of Japanese text can be written with their kana-systems, which consist of moras, which we’ll call syllables for the sake of this lesson. These syllables tell you how to pronounce it, but does not necessarily give you the meaning of it. Unlike English and German which are stress accent languages, Japanese and Chinese are pitch accent and tonal languages respectively. In English, syllables within a word have different emphases, meaning they are pronounced louder, higher, and longer than others Take the word ‘tomorrow’, which has three syllables (‘to’, ‘mor’, ‘row’), and try to pronounce the different kinds of stresses by emphasizing a different syllable each time:

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TO          mor         row

to           MOR        row

   to           mor         ROW

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Which stress sounds correct to you? In a word like “tomorrow”, the second syllable “mo” has more emphasis and the word would sound weird when emphasizing the first or final syllable.

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Activity: Stress and Emphasis

Discuss with a partner:

Take the English words "record" and "contract" and see what meaning the words have when you emphasize the first syllable​: REcord and CONtract
Now do the same but emphasize the final syllable: reCORD and conTRACT
How does the meaning of the word change?

Now take a look at the sentence "I didn't kill the brown cat". What happens when you put the emphasis on a different word in the sentence each time?
Discuss the meanings of the following six sentences:

  1. I didn't kill the brown cat.

  2. I DIDN'T kill the brown cat.

  3. I didn't KILL the brown cat.

  4. I didn't kill THE brown cat.

  5. I didn't kill the BROWN cat.

  6. I didn't kill the brown CAT

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Did you finish the exercise? When the first syllable is stressed for these words, it refers to the nouns: REcord (something in the past that has been recorded/written down), CONtract (a binding agreement between two parties). Whereas by stressing the second syllable, the word class changes and they turn into verbs: to reCORD (creating evidence of something – an audio-recording, writing it down), to conTRACT (limit/restricting ones arms; shortening a word; make a CONtract). Some of the possible meanings of these sentences are: 1. Someone else killed it. 2. I didn’t do it: Denying killing it. 3. I did something else to it. 4. I didn’t kill this brown cat we’re talking about. 5. I killed a different colored-cat. 6. I killed a different brown animal.

In short, the meaning of a word or an utterance can change depending on the location of the stress. This is something that is not clear by simply looking at the words and letters, stress is not something captured by all writing systems.

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However, in pitch accent languages like Japanese the difference in syllables lies in pitch only, usually simplified into a higher or lower pitch. Syllables are not differentiated by emphasizing them as louder or longer, but by whether the pitch changes or remains high or low. A typical example would be the word “hashi” having different meanings depending on pitch:

  • /ha’shi/ with “ha” high and “shi” low means chopsticks (箸),

  • /hashi’/ with “ha” low and “shi” high means bridge (橋),

  • hashi/ with both syllables low means edge (端).

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Although all these words could be written with the same Japanese syllables は/'ha' andし/'shi', their meaning is differentiated by the used characters or “kanji” which is the prevalent writing system in Japanese. Although the pitch is different, it is a rather subtle and difficult thing to pick up for new learners. It is also not always consistent and can change depending on words coming after, therefore context often provides a bigger hint towards the meaning in Japanese. If you hear that someone wants to go to the chopsticks, you are likely mistaken.

But compared to Chinese, Japanese is not considered a tonal language as there are “only” two pitches (high/low) compared to Mandarin’s four tones or Cantonese’s six tones. The word “ma” can mean mother (mā), hemp (má), horse (mǎ), or to scold (mà) depending on whether the tone is flat, rises, falls and rises, or falls respectively. There have been attempts to show these intricacies like pitch through ‘accent symbols’ or diacritics, like for the variations of ‘ma’ in romanized Chinese.

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Here are some pronunciation examples for the different kinds of tones in Japanese and Chinese, can you hear the differences?

はし Chopsticks or Bridge? | Japanese Pitch Accent

When a Japanese native teaches Japanese pronunciation

Chinese Tone Twister

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Chinese tones make different meaning

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Exercise: Japanese Braille
To engage and try another writing system than the alphabet, which is not as complex and overwhelming as Chinese or Japanese characters, try this exercise about Japanese Braille done for the International Linguistic Olympiad in 2009. Note that every block of six dots stands for one syllable, meaning a four syllable word like 'karaoke' would have a block each for 'ka', 'ra', 'o', and 'ke'.

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Exercise 1 on the sheet is solvable without looking up any outside resources.

For exercise 2 and 3 on the sheet, look up the missing syllables on the Wikipedia page for Japanese Braille (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Braille)

 

As an additional exercise, alone or with a partner, here is a list of words that are borrowed from Japanese, and are therefore the same in both languages:

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  • Bonsai

  • Edamame

  • Futon

  • Kamikaze

  • Karate

  • Kendo

  • Manga

  • Origami

  • Otaku

  • Sudoku

  • Sushi

  • Teriyaki

  • Tofu

  • Tsunami

  • Yukata

  • Zen

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Try to write these words in tenji/Japanese Braille. 
Keep in mind: Every syllable has a character and if the letter 'n' is not followed by a vowel, it is considered a syllable by itself. Additionally, voiced consonants (b, d, g, z ) are written by adding a voiced prefix (see Wikipedia page) to the unvoiced counterpart (h, t, k, s respectively), meaning 'bo' is written as prefix + 'ho'; 'do' = prefix + 'to', etc. Therefore, some words and their syllables would be separated as such:

  • Bo - n - sa - i

  • E - da - ma - me

  • Ma - n - ga

  • Su - shi

  • Te - ri - ya - ki

  • Tsu - na - mi

  • Yu - ka - ta

Final thought for this lesson

 

Writing and writing systems are something we use to communicate, but instead of being spoken, formless, and in the moment, they are written down and have therefore a visible physical form. Writing is phonologically based with the aim that someone can more or less reproduce or pronounce the signs and characters and make sense of them. However, due to language constantly changing and evolving, writings systems often do not hold up to current spoken languages, which has lead to spelling reforms, introduction of new words, and multiple accepted spellings. This is something most relatable to every English learner, which due to the history of the language has lead to its complicated orthography that one just has to learn.

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However, keep in mind that the systems we use to communicate, both spoken language and writing, are both arbitrarily chosen. They are culturally bound and specific, and they are norms that have once been defined and adopted as standard. There is no particular reason why the alphabet reads from left to right, other languages write horizontally or from right to left, or why there is an order in the alphabet, going from A to Z. These things have history and are socialized; While a child can learn a spoken language or communication by listening and observing others, they cannot simply learn to read or write without external guidance. Writing is fundamentally different from language: One is constantly changing, has no form and leaves no traces, whereas the other obeys tradition, changes slowly, and is thus always trying to catch up.

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Take home questions​

  1. Why are the written and spoken languages so different?

  2. What are things that writing systems don't show? Name an example.

  3. How have people tried to 'fix' the flaws of writing systems? Name an example​​​​.

  4. How do different languages use stress and what for?

  5. Explain the key words Orthography, Script, and Writing System.

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Sources

 

Content

​Daniels, Peter. T. (2017). Writing Systems. In M. Aronoff & J. Rees-Miller (Eds.) The Handbook of Linguistics. (pp. 75-94.) New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons

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Exercises

British American Spelling: Quiz 1

https://www.englishclub.com/esl-quizzes/spelling/british-american-spelling-quiz-1.php

 

British VS American Spelling: What’s the Difference?

https://www.thelanguagegallery.com/blog/british-vs-american-spelling-what-s-the-difference

 

Japanese Braille Exercise – taken from International Linguistic Olympiad

https://ioling.org/problems/samples/

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Videos

Andy and Sarah Mandarin (2023, March 8). Chinese tones make different meanings Learn Chinese in 1 minute [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/1v1WPArpASM?si=_2lSs9vv34bFVRm7

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Dogen (2022, February 26). When a Japanese native teaches Japanese pronunciation / 日本語のネイティブが日本語の発音を教えると | Dōgen [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/PwNjFaK4OXY?si=_feJDV7wQ3W2usBg

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Kenan Heppe (2023, July 9). Chinese Tone Twister (INSANE) [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/H3R9tnaBjqY?si=cKKChYk2NQcePb-r

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Speak Japanese Naturally (2022, December 24). はし Chopsticks or Bridge? | Japanese Pitch Accent [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/UnYg31wOiag?si=oBS53QV2b1lF2Xr3

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