Written Language & Literacy - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2018

Whether spelling is phonemic is only one factor in whether a writing system is suitable for a given language; another consideration is "lexical distinctiveness" of spelling, in two separate senses, and the importance of lexical distinctiveness grows as a writing system matures. Seen in this light, the increasing irregularity of English spelling, over the period when English has been a written language, has been a desirable response to the changing needs of the English-speaking world.

It is generally accepted that the units of writing systems represent categories found in spoken language; in phonographic writing, these categories traditionally include the syllable and segment, which correspond to syllabic and alphabetic systems. But it has been claimed that some or most “syllabaries” are actually based on moras, well known from phonological theory as units of syllable weight. I argue that apparent moraic systems are in fact built on signs that stand for core CV syllables, and consequently that moras do not appear to play a central role in any writing 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 adapted 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.

The paper deals with the insertion of spaces and hyphens in German. It summarizes the existing optimality-theoretic approach and extends it to capture the use of hyphens. Hyphenation is often excluded in the literature on the writing of complex words, as forms with hyphens are thought to be mere variants of solid forms. The paper offers an alternative view in which hyphens are treated as an intermediate form between solid and open forms and are placed as a result of conflict between constraints which demand or forbid insertion of spaces. The analysis focuses on the products of nominal compounding, which is one of the most productive processes of word formation in German. Firstly, it is shown for which types of compounds hyphenation is optional and obligatory according to the official rules of orthography. Based on this, constraints are postulated, which do not only decide in which cases hyphenation is allowed but also in which positions the hyphens must be placed in the respective compound. Finally, the hyphenation of phrasal compounds and other complex compounds is modeled.

Online messages often diverge from the standard language orthography: so-called textisms have become an indispensable part of youths’ written computer-mediated communication (CMC). This paper presents an in-depth corpus study of texts from four new media produced by Dutch youths: MSN chats, text messages, tweets, and WhatsApp messages. It is demonstrated that Dutch informal written CMC, as in other languages, is implicitly governed by orthographic principles. Relative frequencies of textism types in the corpus show how textisms are effectively used by Dutch youths. Textism types are classified here in terms of forms, operations, and, crucially, functions – the ‘SUPER-functions’: textisms can make orthography more Speechlike, Understandable, Playful, Expressive, or Reduced. Moreover, this study proves that preferences for textism types greatly depend on age group and medium. New media have their own combination of characteristics and constraints, while adolescents and young adults appear to have different perceptions on language use and spelling.