Written Language & Literacy - Current Issue

The German writing system reflects a lot of grammatical structures, such as morphological structures or syllables. Writing shows grammar. This is already true in printed texts, but even more so in handwritten texts, because the potential for variation is greater in those texts. Writers can more easily deviate from the usual shape of a character and use these deviations to mark grammatical patterns. This article presents a suggestion for a methodology for the systematic categorisation of such form deviations in handwritten German texts. Subsequently, it is shown with 〈e〉 and 〈h〉 that form deviations can indeed correlate with linguistic structures.

It was easy to say that writing was invented out of nothing three times (that we can be sure of), in Sumer, China, and Mesoamerica. That syllables were important in those inventions emerged from attention to modern inventions of writing. But in recent years, specialists in Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican texts have been uncovering details about the development of cuneiform and glyphs that, perhaps surprisingly, prove to be comparable and mutually illuminating. In both cases, it seems legitimate to say that the earliest forms did not yet represent the actual writing of specific languages (Writing: A system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer). Chinese writing, even though we cannot observe any essential changes in the system from its earliest known examples to the present day, also proves to have something to contribute, in the wake of a comparative study of how Chinese writing was adapted for writing neighboring (and unrelated) languages. And even half a century of experience with a semiotic system designed to be alinguistic, “Blissymbolics,” has something to tell us about non-writing turning into writing.

This paper compares the little-known writing system Thaana, used for the Maldivian language, with Hangeul, used for Korean. Both were intentional inventions by native speakers in early modern times, and both contain some unique features. Both are segmental in their representation while also arranging their letters into higher-order structures: syllables or CV groupings. These structures obey well-formedness constraints that are well known from the study of phonological (spoken) syllables. This paper argues that the operation of these constraints is evidence that these writing systems employ a grammar, which is analyzed here using Optimality Theory. Thaana and Hangeul use the same syllabification constraints, but the rankings differ between the two systems. The rankings also differ between each writing system and its related spoken language. This paper adds to the growing body of research that applies the tools of linguistic analysis to writing systems and finds evidence of grammar in their structure.

This paper proposes a linguistic theoretical review of French spelling surrounding regularity and consistency questions both in the description of forms and in the estimation of regularity. After having described the terminological ambiguity that prevails in these analyses and after having shown the impact of this ambiguity on the analysis of written errors, we propose a new classification of French written errors passing through theoretically-driven and concept-driven analyses. This classification, focuses on the production of lexical and grammatical spelling created for the DynaPen project and is available on OSF.