Graphic Contexts Determine Characters' Functions
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[This is a guest post by J. Marshall Unger.]
I do not believe it is useful, let alone necessary, to classify every character of a writing system as a phonogram, logogram, syllabogram, logosyllabogram, or any other kind of “gram.” Characters function logographically or phonographically depending on the degree to which they reflect the phonological, as opposed to the lexical, structure of the part of an utterance they are used to represent. One and the same character can function phonographically in one context, logographically in another, and in both ways in yet another. This is a consequence of what Martinet called the double articulation of language, i.e. Hockett’s duality of patterning or Hjemslev’s plereme/ceneme distinction. One may say for convenience that a character that functions logographically in a particular context is a logogram, but to the extent that doing so invites the unwary to think that logograms enjoy some sort of context-free existence in a Platonic universe of symbols, it is a bad idea.
In writing systems with fewer than about eight dozen characters, most function phonographically most of the time, though some are occasionally deployed logographically in abbreviations, anachronistic spellings, and so on. This is because keeping texts short and retaining customary spellings often has practical value. Likewise, predominantly phonographic writing systems, unless specially designed to do so, seldom encode small phonetic differences in the realization of phonemes; indeed, some do not require notating certain predictable phonemic information (e.g. vowels in Arabic script).
Only in writing systems with many hundreds of characters is a substantial degree of logographic representation even possible. In such systems—Chinese is the prime example—the difficulty of learning a large number of characters well enough for reading and writing with ease is compensated for by introducing phonographic mnemonics into the graphic structure of many characters. If these design features were absent, the set of characters would be no better than the multidigit numbers in a large codebook, which assures that messages they are used to encode are meaningless to anyone without knowledge of the codebook but hardly embodies a learnable writing system for practical purposes.
Selected readings
- "Script origin and typology, part 1" (7/1/24)
- "Script origin and typology, part 2" (7/5/24)
- "The Origin(s) of Writing" (3/19/22)
Scott Mauldin said,
July 13, 2024 @ 3:04 am
I once posited a similar idea on reddit's /r/linguistics subreddit and the idea was not well received; I proposed that English had a logographic component not dissimilar to the dual phonological/logographic nature of some Chinese characters (e.g. 园 has the 元 as a phonological component and the square around it logographic indicator of a closed space). In modern English we can see that the word "knight" has -ni–t as the phonological components whereas the k–gh- now serve no purpose other than to hint to the etymology and distinguish it visually from homophones ("right" might be a better example of the latter).
On some level we know this intuitively. The letter X has strong connotations of denial, negation, rejection, hence "Malcolm X", "Mx.", "Latinx" and "X-Men". Parents who give their Children very unique names often give great thought to what the visual and denotative effect is of using a "k" in place of a "c" or "y" in place of an "i". Arabic and Chinese calligraphy give great weight to the aesthetic and contextual components of the letters, characters or individual radicals (was there not a post here on languagelog a few months ago about how Chinese parents may sometimes decide on a phonological name for a new baby, then pick characters for their phonological and aesthetic effect?)
Benjamin Geer said,
July 13, 2024 @ 4:19 am
It’s worth noting that the phonemic information that usually isn’t notated in Arabic is predictable only if you understand what you’re reading. A given string of characters can have different possible realisations, with different phonemes and different meanings. Readers choose the one that makes the most sense in context. This is sometimes true in English as well: “read” can be present tense or past tense, with different phonemes. Arabic just has a lot more of that.
Chris Button said,
July 13, 2024 @ 9:42 am
The Shuowen has six types of Chinese character. In practice, there was just one.
@ Scott Mauldin
Geoffrey Sampson wrote something similar. He then pointed out how native English speakers read and process English text more like native Chinese speakers read Chinese texts than for example native Spanish speakers read Spanish texts. English writing is therefore more similar to Chinese than Spanish from a functional reading perspective.
Cervantes said,
July 13, 2024 @ 1:44 pm
CB — I take it you mean that Spanish orthography is consistent with pronunciation, whereas English is not necessarily. It is true that competent readers of English recognize words as units rather than sounding them out as they go, otherwise indeed we could not read words such as knight, colonel, or for that matter could. However, I don't think that just because Spanish readers could do that means they actually do. Users of phonetic alphabets learn to see whole words, the phonetics only matter when we encounter unfamiliar ones. And uncommon words in English are pretty much always spelled phonetically. I don't think there's any real difference.
Cervantes said,
July 13, 2024 @ 2:00 pm
Come to think of it I'd like to say a bit more about this. The advantage of phonetic alphabets is that it's much easier to learn to read. Children can sound out words without having to drill their appearance by rote. But once we do learn to read well, we perceive words as logographs. When I was in elementary school, they used a machine called a tachistoscope, which flashed text so fast there wasn't time to sound it out, to get the logographs into our brains.
Chris Button said,
July 13, 2024 @ 2:40 pm
@ Cervantes
If I recall correctly (I don't have Sampson's "Writing Systems" book to hand), the point was that the shapes of words in English are more distinctive because of the quirky spelling that differentiates them. So, fluent readers of English could read very slightly faster than fluent readers of Spanish in controlled testing. However, the difference in speed isn't at all meaningful for practical purposes, and Spanish spelling is far easier to master.
Cervantes said,
July 13, 2024 @ 3:12 pm
The only difference I can see is that there are some English homophones that are spelled differently, so you might have a slight advantage differentiating knight from night, say, or colonel from kernel. But I would think that the context would make any such momentary confusion very rare. And on the downside, that makes English spelling and reading slightly more difficult to learn in the first place. But the bottom line is still that readers in any language are mostly processing logographs, and of course Chinese characters can also have multiple meanings.
Chester Draws said,
July 13, 2024 @ 3:45 pm
And uncommon words in English are pretty much always spelled phonetically.
Well, yes and no. Without knowing the origins of words, I can be very hard to know how they are pronounced, because English has multiple ways of doing things "phonetically".
The list of uncommon words I, as a native and well-read speaker, have pronounced wrongly for years is quite long. Some examples:
— clerestory (I thought was clerest-ory)
— eschatological (only once I knew it was Greek, did I get the hard k)
And it gets much worse for proper names:
— Penelope
— Hermione
__ Worcester
Chas Belov said,
July 13, 2024 @ 5:57 pm
@Chris Button: While I agree that Spanish spelling is easier to master than English spelling, I do regularly see b-v, s-z, and h-null confusion.
Cervantes said,
July 13, 2024 @ 7:30 pm
As far as I know, H is always silent, but it does serve to distinguish some homophones. B and V are pronounced the same in most topolects, maybe not quite in some. Often they disappear intervocularly. S and Z should always be the same as far as I know, but they do affect syllable emphasis.
Rodger C said,
July 14, 2024 @ 10:15 am
Often they disappear intervocularly.
Como un buvo.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 14, 2024 @ 4:25 pm
Re: terms like logograph(ic), etc., these literally, literally mean "used to write a word," etc. Reference to mappings between written symbols and units of language is precisely, precisely to exclude the wrong idea that such symbols might be meaningfully characterizable "context-free."
Yes clearly such mappings can be complicated and overlap, etc.: so e.g. logographic features of the substantially phonographic systems used to write English, Spanish, etc., noted by Scott Mauldin are well-recognized (consider just e.g. word-spacing.)
Re: "phonographic mnemonics" in Chinese, no, these reflect a massively productive coinage device but aren't particularly relevant to fluent reading. What is arguably relevant is simply componential substructure — itself a kind of "double articulation." It is this and not "phonetics" per se (which fluent readers need know little about) that differentiates the set of Chinese characters from "a large codebook." IDK if substructure of this kind is truly essential however… fluent readers of e.g. Tangut may be able to give us a clue.
Yves Rehbein said,
July 14, 2024 @ 6:15 pm
My solution to this false dilemme of logos vs. phone is basicly that sound shapes, so-called phonemes, are trivial entities in the world like any any other non-platonic shape. Hence phonograms are a limited subset of logograms, implying that phoneme is semantically meaningful concept.
> In a written language, a logogram, also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram
Every letter has a name, doesn't it? So when we learned writing B was a /bi:/ and H was a /'eɪt͡ʃ/, but some were taught to pronounce /bᵊ/ and /hᵊ/ with a vanishing syllable nucleus. Eitherway, German SMS shorthand hdgdl ("hab dich ganz doll lieb") is plausibly reduced to /ha-di-ge-de-el/ but the intonation sounds to me like the pitch contour of the vowels remains intact.
Ludwig D. Morenz ("Die Genese der Alphabetschrift", 2011:16f) opens with an example from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, who asked his teacher what an "A" is. Morenz, concerned with which shape of A respectively aleph was implied by Thomas' own answer, cares to point out Dornseiff ("Das Alphabet", 1926:17) with interpretations of the shape of A from antiquity to romanticism. More importantly, this anecdote underlines the dual functions of notation and cultural symbol, as Thomas speaks of the holy Hebrew in contrast to a mundain Greek. This is a curious point with respect to the shape of aleph described by Thomas, because the hiero-glyphs are "holy" in Greek whereas koine means "common".
Another example to this effect is aduced from the Egyptian Wen-Amun myth, in which the Tjeker king Ba'al of Byblos lauds the mnḫ.t ("technique (as opposed to knowledge)", "excelence" [TLA], "Die Wurzel mnḫ hängt mit dem Glätten von Oberflächen mittels des mnḫ-Meissels zusammen" [Morenz, cf. fn. 5]) and sbꜣ.yt ("teaching; instruction; punishment" [TLA], "Wissenschaft" [Morenz]).
Eventually he refers to form and function (p. 34), which sounds like the -etic / -emic distinction (cp. graphetic, graphematic). He also notes that proper nouns are of importance in deciphering ancient scripts. This works for B "beta" < bayt indeed, yet it fails for H "hêta" vs. E in the bigger picture (NB: Adiego "Adaptaciones del alfabeto griego", in: Palaeohispanica. Revista sobre lenguas y culturas de la Hispania Antigua, No. 20, 2020:1020; though it makes perfect sense in view of hepta "7", alphabetic position of Η; or š in the South Semitic order of the Alphabet).
Of course you might want to make more precise determinations, which will be mostly linguistic if focused on phonetically spelled languages. You'll want to look for useful design features and you'll find that "If these design features were absent, the set of characters would be no better than the multidigit numbers in a large codebook, [@JMU]
We call them dictionary, lexikon, ordbok, glossary, catalogue, … And we have many different types depending on form and function. The problems come when the dictionary is wrong or missing from the shelf.