Written Language & Literacy - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2021

It has often been assumed that there is, or should be, a one-to-one correspondence between graphs and linguistic units in writing systems as the norm. This is not merely doubtful in terms of descriptive accuracy. Conceptualizing writing systems in such a way also has profound consequences for the application of typological categories to specific cases. In this paper we first suggest a working definition of polygraphy, also touching upon its demarcation from adjacent concepts such as ligatures and diacritics. Having demonstrated that polygraphy is in fact fundamental to a significant number of typologically diverse writing systems, we argue in favor of a typology of writing systems taking the ubiquity of polygraphy into due account, with definitions going beyond one-to-one correspondences as the default.

Past research approached the origins of the Coptic alphabet sociolinguistically and empirically. Neither can fully explain the comparatively sudden and fundamental change from a supraphonemic to a phonemic writing system for Egyptian around the second century AD. This paper adds the cognitive-linguistic concept of the grain size of a writing system to the picture. In essence, by the second century, sound changes in Egyptian had resulted in a phonological structure of the language that mapped more easily onto a phonemic writing system than previous stages of the language. This coincided with socio-political developments favouring the Greek alphabet. As a result, multiple writing systems, which shared the underlying structure, alphabetic, and model, the Greek alphabet, emerged. Eventually, one of these prevailed, the Coptic alphabet.

This chapter examines the earliest writing and related marking practices from Egypt (c.3300 / c.3100–c.2750 BCE), namely graphical marks on ceramic jars and small labels of bone, ivory and wood. In contrast to research focusing on production, this material is examined here from the perspective of consumption. Whether through ‘reading’ or other forms of semantic meaning-making, the author argues that such acts were never neutral, but rather situated within a web of embodied and multisensory processes. These are examined on two recursively related levels: firstly, that of micro-relations, including intersections between embodied perception of marking technique, size, shape, colour and format of signs; and secondly, macro-relations between text-objects and the embodied practitioner within particular cultural spaces. Although this early evidence presents many interpretive challenges, this chapter attempts to demonstrate the value of developing more context-sensitive reconstructions of written culture as part of lived experience – experience for which the body was a fundamental vehicle and mediator.

It has often been claimed that writing systems have formal grammars structurally analogous to those of spoken and signed phonology. This paper demonstrates one consequence of this analogy for Chinese script and the writing systems that it has influenced: as with phonology, areal script patterns include the borrowing of formal regularities, not just of formal elements or interpretive functions. Whether particular formal Chinese script regularities were borrowed, modified, or ignored also turns out not to depend on functional typology (in morphemic/syllabic Tangut script, moraic Japanese katakana, and featural/phonemic/syllabic Korean hangul) but on the benefits of making the borrowing system visually distinct from Chinese, the relative productivity of the regularities within Chinese character grammar, and the level at which the borrowing takes place.

Decoding a writing system is an impressive task requiring recognition of connections between printed symbols and the language they represent. Recognising the linguistic anchors for individual symbols is however not enough. Inferences are needed about unseen and often unstated encoding principles. This paper reviews task demands implicit in children’s books and find the models of orthographic learning in an Indic writing system must go beyond a focus on intra-symbol cues, the size of the symbol set, and the nature of sound-symbol mapping. The child-directed print corpus also shows a substantial demand for recognition of multimorphemic words. Since children encounter an ever-expanding variety of such words in the books they read, it is essential to mount systematic studies on morphological development. At a methodological level, this exploratory study shows the limitations of building models of literacy development when real world encounters with a writing system are not adequately taken into account.

A survey of modern descendants of Brahmi shows that the letter forms and various other features of the scripts vary, but the use of an inherent vowel and of dependent, satellite signs for other vowels is remarkably stable. Comparison is made to other scripts invented in the same geographic region, Thaana and Sorang Sompeng, and to the Arabic script as used in Arabic, Persian, Sorani Kurdish, Uyghur, and Kashmiri. Arabic scripts maintain uniform letter forms but vary considerably in their treatment of vowels. Cultural factors may explain the visual diversity of Brahmic scripts as compared to Arabic scripts. The stable combination of inherent vowel and satellite vowels derives from the decodability of simple aksharas into pronounceable syllabic units in the acquisition of reading. This akshara advantage is related to the psychological grain size theory of reading, with the additional claim that the syllable has special status because it is pronounceable.