A guide to writing systems

[Moose-tache]

Somewhere on a Korean linguistics forum:
"Hey, did you know the English Latin alphabet requires people to read forward and back, constantly changing direction?"
"How so?"
"Well, you know how you can make a word like F-A-T fat?"
"Sure."
"But then, what if there's an E, as in F-A-T-E fate? Once you get to the E, you have to go back, erase fat, and re-write the A from an A sound to an AH sound."
"My God, you're right! Their eye muscles must be so tired."
"If only they read as we do, scanning small chunks of text at a time, using familiarity and context to help."
"The poor fools..."

[bradrn]

Somewhere on a Korean linguistics forum:
Idiot: "Hey, did you know the English Latin alphabet requires people to read forward and back, constantly changing direction?"
Moron: "How so?"
Idiot: "Well, you know how you can make a word like F-A-T fat?"
Moron: "Sure."
Idiot: "But then, what if there's an E, as in F-A-T-E fate? Once you get to the E, you have to go back, erase fat, and re-write the A from an A sound to an AH sound."
Moron: "My God, you're right! Their eye muscles must be so tired."
Idiot: "If only they read as we do, scanning small chunks of text at a time, using familiarity and context to help."
Moron: "The poor fools..."

Did I not specifically mention that I wasn’t talking about psychology? Clearly there’s something about the way I’m phrasing this which is confusing people, but I can’t for the life of me understand what it is.

(And yes, on a purely descriptive level, I do consider English to be mildly nonlinear in this regard: from primary school, I distinctly recall learning ⟨a__e⟩ etc. as single units.)

[masako]

Except those terms are conventionally used to describe arrangement at a higher level than graphemes, which is not what the previous post was about.

Which is why I said Hangul is "an alphabet (with a few abugidic elements)", but you insist on referring to Hangul as "syllable blocks". That's an abugida, plain and simple.

But it’s a clearly different story to scripts like Latin, which pick one direction and stick to it for the rest of the text.

Of course it's "different from Latin", it has abugidic elements. You're trying to create a new category for Hangul that is quite superfluous.

It feels like you’re being weirdly hostile here.

I'm sorry you feel that way.

I’m not trying to rewrite any books, just to be slightly more comprehensive than the various other resources online which describe the ‘alphabet/abjad/syllabary/abugida’ classification and leave it at that.

If comprehensiveness is your goal, that's laudable, but you seem unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the work that's already out there. Also, you seem to ignore that the terminology you're using is not only unconventional, but typical of superficial fans of Hangul/Korean and folks that have barely cracked any academic references on orthography.

I'll leave you to it since my attempts to assist have seemingly caused you emotional distress. Good luck.

[bradrn]

I’m not trying to rewrite any books, just to be slightly more comprehensive than the various other resources online which describe the ‘alphabet/abjad/syllabary/abugida’ classification and leave it at that.

If comprehensiveness is your goal, that's laudable, but you seem unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the work that's already out there

So please tell me what work is out there that I haven’t read! I am always excited to find new references to learn from.

Except those terms are conventionally used to describe arrangement at a higher level than graphemes, which is not what the previous post was about.

Which is why I said Hangul is "an alphabet (with a few abugidic elements)", but you insist on referring to Hangul as "syllable blocks". That's an abugida, plain and simple.

Firstly: I never did refer to Hangeul as ‘syllable blocks’. I said it has syllable blocks… which it does! Hangeul jamo are arranged in blocks, each of which transcribes one syllable. I hope you can agree with me on that, at least.

Secondly: Hangeul is certainly not an abugida. In plain and simple terms, it is an alphabet. Abugidas are defined by having an inherent vowel, which Hangeul does not: every jamo represents one sound (sandhi excepted). This is why I placed so much emphasis on it being atypical for an alphabet: it has some properties most often seen in abugidas — in particular, having syllable blocks — but it is nonetheless an alphabet at heart.

For similar reasons, I think it’s misleading to describe syllable blocks as being specifically abugidic. Meroitic is an abugida, yet graphically it displays no syllable blocks at all. Hangeul is an alphabet, yet it also has syllable blocks. And of course, all syllabaries have syllable blocks by definition! The property ‘having syllable blocks’ is independent of the property ‘is an abugida’ (i.e. ‘has an inherent vowel’), though there is admittedly a strong correlation.

[Raphael]

If this is the result when someone tries to start a thread with a number of useful resources... Anyway, thank you for your work, bradrn.

[bradrn]

If this is the result when someone tries to start a thread with a number of useful resources... Anyway, thank you for your work, bradrn.

It’s too boring when everyone agrees with me (and then I learn nothing). I’m glad you find it useful!

[keenir]

Hangeul’s
jamo

One of the things I always hear when it comes to Hangeul, is that it is featural - which means that each jamo looks like the shape of the mouth as it is pronounced.

But what happens when drift occurs? Do the jamo ensure that the mouth is always shaped the same way & thus every jamo is always pronounced the same, no matter how much time passes? Or will the jamo be re-drawn to match the new mouth shapes of the new pronounciation? Or will it be a case of "well, now it joins English and Tibetan as victims of drift." ?

repaving the roads to Rome...

All roads need to be repaved...otherwise you get potholes.

as for hangeul, it is linear when analysed syllabically,
and just as alphabetic writing is read logographically,
I don't think Korean writing, which uses spaces between words, is read any differently...

Yes, there are spaces between the jamo of Hangeul.

[keenir]

thus, languages with a logographic script don't change to a phonic script without external constraints, which enables them to endure culturally;
but logographic usage is a necessity for languages with a phonic script, to limit their rapid obsolescence...

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, particularly that second line. Please clarify?

[xxx]

languages that use logographies only abandon them under conquest...
sound-based scripts use a logographic reading system,
that enables them to survive despite rapid changes in pronunciation...

[zompist]

thus, languages with a logographic script don't change to a phonic script without external constraints, which enables them to endure culturally;
but logographic usage is a necessity for languages with a phonic script, to limit their rapid obsolescence...

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, particularly that second line. Please clarify?

I believe xxx is referring to the fact that fluent readers do not sound out graphemes, but (mostly) grasp entire words as a gestalt.

That gets back to psychology, and of course such psychological statements amount to saying that the process has retreated below conscious level and we're all just speculating on how the brain does it.

I think xxx is also focusing on languages like English and French which have retained out-of-date orthographies. Writing systems do tend to be preserved for centuries or millennia. But it's not a necessity— e.g. Spanish likes to reform its orthography every few centuries.

[xxx]

I believe xxx is referring to the fact that fluent readers do not sound out graphemes, but (mostly) grasp entire words as a gestalt.
That gets back to psychology

in that way we could see linguistics as a branch of psychology...

it's hard to ignore objective elements on the pretext that they are implemented by unknown cognitive mechanisms...
you might as well ignore all the human sciences...

and yet it is on this basis, at least pragmatically, that conlanging is founded...

[Travis B.]

thus, languages with a logographic script don't change to a phonic script without external constraints, which enables them to endure culturally;
but logographic usage is a necessity for languages with a phonic script, to limit their rapid obsolescence...

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, particularly that second line. Please clarify?

I believe xxx is referring to the fact that fluent readers do not sound out graphemes, but (mostly) grasp entire words as a gestalt.

That gets back to psychology, and of course such psychological statements amount to saying that the process has retreated below conscious level and we're all just speculating on how the brain does it.

I think xxx is also focusing on languages like English and French which have retained out-of-date orthographies. Writing systems do tend to be preserved for centuries or millennia. But it's not a necessity— e.g. Spanish likes to reform its orthography every few centuries.

Of course, what must be remembered is that, as a means of teaching languages' orthographies, phonics has proven itself to be much more successful than whole language. While adults typically do not sound out graphemes for words whose pronunciations they know (of course, the fact that they do not always know words' pronunciations is shown by spelling pronunciation), kids do indeed rely on spellings as a starting point, which this shows, and is predicted by the orthographic depth hypothesis.

[zompist]

I believe xxx is referring to the fact that fluent readers do not sound out graphemes, but (mostly) grasp entire words as a gestalt.

Of course, what must be remembered is that, as a means of teaching languages' orthographies, phonics has proven itself to be much more successful than whole language. While adults typically do not sound out graphemes for words whose pronunciations they know (of course, the fact that they do not always know words' pronunciations is shown by spelling pronunciation), kids do indeed rely on spellings as a starting point, which this shows, and is predicted by the orthographic depth hypothesis.

Yes, of course, which is why I talked about fluent readers. Information on writing systems usually concentrates on the things that are new to learners, whether native or foreign speakers. It's just worth remembering that once the system is learned, those things are much less relevant.

[bradrn]

Hangeul’s
jamo

One of the things I always hear when it comes to Hangeul, is that it is featural - which means that each jamo looks like the shape of the mouth as it is pronounced.

But what happens when drift occurs? Do the jamo ensure that the mouth is always shaped the same way & thus every jamo is always pronounced the same, no matter how much time passes? Or will the jamo be re-drawn to match the new mouth shapes of the new pronounciation? Or will it be a case of "well, now it joins English and Tibetan as victims of drift." ?

This is something different to what I’ve been discussing — it largely relates to the form of the jamo, rather than their arrangement or function. For myself, I don’t find the ‘featural’ argument particularly convincing; more probably Hangeul letterforms are rationalised variants of 'Phags-pa. But if you do accept that Hangeul jamo intrinsically represent specific consonants in their shape, then yes, they would have to drift. (I can’t imagine anyone redrawing them for purely featural reasons.)

Information on writing systems usually concentrates on the things that are new to learners, whether native or foreign speakers. It's just worth remembering that once the system is learned, those things are much less relevant.

For that matter, my general guide for what to concentrate on here is ‘things that are relevant for conlangers’, which is a slightly different set of things yet again.

[zompist]

I believe xxx is referring to the fact that fluent readers do not sound out graphemes, but (mostly) grasp entire words as a gestalt.
That gets back to psychology

in that way we could see linguistics as a branch of psychology...

it's hard to ignore objective elements on the pretext that they are implemented by unknown cognitive mechanisms...
you might as well ignore all the human sciences...

I don't know what you're trying to say. If they're unknown, they're not objective.

A lot of nonsense gets written, especially by linguists, by people who assume they know how the brain works when they don't. One of my pet peeves is people who assume that the brain works like computer code: following a linear path in a single processor. So they worry about things like code efficiency on an entirely false basis. We know that the brain is a huge collection of tiny processors, so a better default assumption is that, in effect, it throws a problem at all of them. That is, the brain-efficient algorithm for (say) a lexicon lookup may be "ask every word if it recognizes the input" rather than any kind of lexical search.

In term of fluent reading, we know that people generally recognize entire words. But that just tells us what is available to consciousness or intuition. What are those "unknown mechanisms"? There are several possibilities.

1. Sub-processes read grapheme by grapheme, check the mental lexicon, and return the (single) result. That is, they act just like a beginning reader, but we're not aware of the subprocesses and thus think we're grasping the word as a gestalt.
2. The word, presumably because it's so common, is recognized as a single unit. In Chinese terms, we could say that it recognizes 奴 without processing 女 and 又. Again, the brain doesn't need to care about saving space: it's easy to imagine that it stores completely separate representations of these three characters, perhaps because they were learned "out of order."
3. The brain only stores the features needed to distinguish a word from other words. E.g. "language" has the pattern Xxxχxxχx— that is, a pattern of ascenders and descenders. If no other common word has that pattern, that's all you need to store. Or maybe it's lxxχxxχe... another psychological observation is that English readers rely heavily on first and last letters.
4. Who knows, something more exotic.

Also, a huge caveat: I think it's pretty likely that there are neurons that (are trained to) recognize 奴 or L (or "language"). But the visual input does not contain either! So those neurons depend on sub-sub-processes, and those are built out of even lower processes, e.g. neurons that identify edges or lines. And those aren't even the lowest level: the visual field is constantly moving and to "see a thing" is like looking at a set of blurry photographs and identifying which blurs are "the same thing out there".

[Moose-tache]

I came here to remind bradrn not to assume I was talking only about him, and I found another person being wrong about Hangeul.

One of the things I always hear when it comes to Hangeul, is that it is featural - which means that each jamo looks like the shape of the mouth as it is pronounced.

Maybe we just stop having opinions about Hangeul for a while, guys? Go have some bad takes about Devanagari for a couple of days and spare my blood pressure.

[bradrn]

I came here to remind bradrn not to assume I was talking only about him

Ah, thanks for the clarification! Sarcasm is hard on the Internet.

Go have some bad takes about Devanagari for a couple of days and spare my blood pressure.

No need to worry, I’ll get right onto it as soon as I talk about abugidas.

[keenir]

In hindsight, I should have asked my question as soon as it came to mind (right after the recent chapter was posted) and not let it slip my mind for so long.

Go have some bad takes about Devanagari for a couple of days

As Chairman Kaga says, "If memory serves..." Devanagari is where we get the word a-bu-gi-da from, isn't it?

and spare my blood pressure.

Hope you feel better.

[zompist]

As Chairman Kaga says, "If memory serves..." Devanagari is where we get the word a-bu-gi-da from, isn't it?

Nope, it's Ge'ez.

[bradrn]

For the record, if it were from Devanagari, we would have had to call them ‘ka-kha-ga-ghas’ instead!