WRITING SYSTEM
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P332
2025-10-27
30
WRITING SYSTEM
A method of representing language visually. Three main types of writing system are used by the world’s languages, though no language’s orthography provides an exact example of one of these systems.
alphabets: with a symbol for each phoneme of the language;
syllabaries: with a symbol for each syllable of the language;
logographic systems: with a symbol for each word of the language.
The first two are based upon the phonology of the language, and the third upon the language’s lexical system. However, it is not necessarily true that writing in a logographic script involves a direct mapping from a concept to a word shape. For example, about 90 per cent of Chinese characters consist of two parts: a radical followed by a phonetic element. It seems likely that, when recalling a character, a Mandarin writer is influenced in part at least by the phonology of the word. Furthermore, any mainland Chinese writer educated from 1958 onwards has some phonological awareness through having done their first writing in pinyin, a phonemic representation of Mandarin based upon the Roman alphabet.
Is the process of employing a logographic system different in psychological terms from that of employing a phonologically based one? Japanese has a mixed orthography, with lexical items written in logographic kanji characters but inflections and function words written in simpler kana characters which represent syllables. Evidence suggests that the two systems do involve two different types of processing. In cases of senile dementia, the ability to produce kanji characters is usually lost well before the ability to produce kana. This may mean that the phonologically based kana is the more robust; but it may simply reflect the fact that Japanese children acquire kana characters first.
Clearly a logographic system makes great demands on the writer’s memory store– though apparently Chinese writers can manage with a minimum of only about 2000 characters. With a phonological system, a writer has the advantage of a prior knowledge of the spoken word, from which spellings can sometimes be guessed. However, at a pre literate stage, children may not be sensitive to the individual sounds which make up the words in their language. Evidence from adult Portuguese illiterates suggests that we only learn to recognise the individual phonemes of our language as a result of learning an alphabet.
An interesting case is presented by an alphabetic script such as Arabic which depends chiefly upon the representation of consonants. Part of the writer’s representation must take the form of semantic links between words, since the same letter string represents: ‘books’, ‘he wrote’ and ‘it is written’. A consonantal system of this kind is clearly fast in execution, since not all sounds are represented; but it is a system that throws up ambiguities which the reader has to resolve by reference to context.
See also: Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, Graphotactic rules, Orthography
Further reading: Coulmas (1989); Harris and Coltheart (1986)
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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