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Alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. There are other systems of writing such as logograms, in which each symbol represents a morpheme, or word, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable. The word "alphabet" itself comes from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet. There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of them are 'linear', which means that they are made up of lines. Notable exceptions are the Braille alphabet, Morse code and the cuneiform alphabet of the ancient city of Ugarit.

Types

Among segmental scripts (that is, scripts that use a separate glyph for each phoneme, commonly called "alphabets"), one may distinguish abjads, which only record consonants and were first developed by the Egyptians as part of their hieroglyphic script; true alphabets which record consonants and vowels separately, first developed by the Greeks; and abugidas, in which the vowels are indicated by diacritical marks or systematic modification of the form of the consonants, first developed by the Indians. Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean Hangul; and abugidas are used to write Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary, as a glyph stands for a consonant and is rotated to represent the vowel, rather than each consonant-vowel combination being represented by a separate glyph, as in a true syllabary. The boundaries between these three types are not always clear-cut. For example, Iraqi Kurdish is written in the Arabic script, which is normally an abjad. However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short a was not written, as in the abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the Ge'ez abugida have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the system is learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad became logographic. (See below.) Thus the primary classification of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on the treatment of tone, though there are as yet no names to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, tone is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script (an abugida), vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the vowel relative to the consonant indicates the tone. More rarely, a script has separate letters for the tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang. For many of these languages, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas. Alphabets can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been conflated, that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented g, d, y, k, and j. However, such simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but had to be learned as word symbols – that is, as logograms like Egyptian Demotic. The largest segmental script is probably an abugida, Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used. The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the khutma letters (letters with a dot added to represent sounds from Persian and English). The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 51 letters. The largest true alphabets include Kabardian and Abxaz (for Cyrillic), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak (for the Latin alphabet), with 46. However, these scripts either include di- and tri-graphs, similar to Spanish ch, or diacritics, like Slovak č. The largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent is probably Georgian, with 41 letters. Syllabaries typically include 50 to 400 glyphs (though the Múra-Pirahã language of Brazil would require only 24 if tone were not indicated, and Rotokas 30), and the glyphs of logographic systems number from the hundreds to the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script. It is not always clear what constitutes a distinct alphabet. French uses the same basic alphabet as English, but many of the letters can carry diacritic and other marks (for example, é, à or ô). In French, these marks are not considered to create additional letters. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters (such as á, í and ö) are considered distinct letters of the alphabet. Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Old English and Ȣ in Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which came from d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, or Italian, which only uses the letters j, k, x, y and w for foreign words.

Spelling

Each language may establish certain general rules that govern the association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed. In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. However, languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language. Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:
- A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. Kabardian uses a tesseragraph (four letters) for one of its phonemes.
- A language may represent the same phoneme with two different letters or combinations of letters.
- A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or other reasons.
- Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence.
- Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same word.
- A language may use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items (such as the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries, or the various rules in English for spelling words from Latin and Greek, or the original Germanic vocabulary. National languages generally elect to address the problem of dialects by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. However, with an international language with wide variations in its dialects, such as English, it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet. Some national languages like Finnish have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. The Italian verb corresponding to 'spell', compitare, is unknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is almost never needed: each phoneme of Standard Italian is represented in only one way. However, pronunciation cannot always be predicted from spelling because certain letters are pronounced in more than one way. In standard Spanish, it is possible to tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa; this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. At the other extreme, however, are languages such as English and Irish, where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not correspond to sounds in a consistent way. For English, this is because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times retaining their original spelling at varying levels. However, even English has general rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time. The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Collation

An alphabet also serves to establish an order among letters that can be used for sorting entries in lists, called collating. Note that the order does not have to be constant among different languages using this alphabet; for examples see Latin alphabet: Collating in other languages. In recent years the Unicode initiative has attempted to collate most of the world's known writing systems into a single character encoding. As well as its primary purpose of standardising computer processing of non-Roman scripts, the Unicode project has provided a focus for script-related scholarship.

The Alphabet Effect

Some communication theorists (notably those associated with the so-called "Toronto school of communications", such as Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and more recently Robert K. Logan) have advanced hypotheses to the effect that alphabetic scripts in particular have served to promote and encourage the skills of analysis, coding, decoding, and classification. This set of hypotheses may be known as "the Alphabet effect", after the title of Logan's 1986 work. The theory claims that a greater level of abstraction is required due to the greater economy of symbols in alphabetic systems; and this abstraction needed to interpret phonemic symbols in turn has contributed in some way to the development of the societies which use it. Proponents of this theory hold that the development of alphabetic (as distinct to other types of) writing systems has made a significant impact on "Western" thinking and development because it introduced a new level of abstraction, analysis, and classification. McLuhan and Logan (1977) postulates that, as a result of these skills, the use of the alphabet created an environment conducive to the development of codified law, monotheism, abstract science, deductive logic, objective history, and individualism. According to Logan, "All of these innovations, including the alphabet, arose within the very narrow geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea, and within the very narrow time frame between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C." (Logan 2004). However, many of these abstractions first occurred in societies which did not use an alphabet, such as the codified law of Hammurabi in Babylonia, which predated similar codes in societies with the alphabet. Since the alphabet quickly spread to become nearly ubiquitous, it is difficult to trace cause and effect in this matter.

References

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- McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. (1977). Alphabet, Mother of Invention. Etcetera. Vol. 34, pp. 373-383.
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External links

- [http://omniglot.com/writing/alphabetic.htm Alphabetic Writing Systems]
- Michael Everson's [http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/index.html Alphabets of Europe]
- The [http://www.unicode.org/cldr/data/diff/by_type/characters.html Unicode Consortium]
- [http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html Evolution of alphabets] animation by Prof. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland
- [http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html History of alphabet]
- [http://hebrew4christians.com/Grammar/Unit_One/Aleph-Bet/aleph-bet.html The Hebrew Alphabet] Category:Alphabetic writing systems Category:Documents Category:Writing als:Alphabet ko:자모 문자 ms:Aksara ja:アルファベット simple:Alphabet th:อักษร

Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. It is the basic unit that distinguishes words and morphemes. That is, changing an element of a word from one phoneme to another produces either a different word or obvious nonsense; whereas changing an element from one phone to another, when both belong to the same phoneme, produces the same word with an odd or incomprehensible pronunciation. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but mental abstractions of them. A phoneme is a family of phones, called allophones, that the speakers of a language think of, and hear or see, as being the same. In sign languages, the phoneme was formerly called a chereme (or cheireme), but usage changed to phoneme when it was recognized that the mental abstractions involved are essentially the same as in oral languages. A "perfect" alphabet is one that has a single symbol for each phoneme. Phonemics, a branch of phonology, is the study of the systems of phonemes of languages. Although it is fundamental to most phonological theories, some linguists reject the theoretical validity of the phoneme. Some think that phonemes are more a product of literacy (i.e., the need to categorize the phonetics of a language in order to write it down systematically with a minimum number of letters). Other critics charge that the mind processes sub-phonemic elements of speech (e.g., features) in meaningful ways. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding so-called minimal pairs: words that differ only in the phones in question.

Background and related ideas

The term phonème was reportedly first used by Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it refered to only a sound of speech. The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875-1895. The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and other of the Prague School (during the years 1926-1935), as well as in that of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield. Later, it was also used in generative linguistics, most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, and remains central in any accounts of the development of virtually all modern schools of phonology. The phoneme can be defined as "the smallest meaningful psychological unit of sound." The phoneme has mental, physiological, and physical substance: our brains process the sounds; the sounds are produced by the human speech organs; and the sounds are physical entities that can be recorded and measured. For an example of phonemes, consider the English words pat and sat, which differ only in their initial consonants. This difference, known as contrastiveness or opposition, is sufficient to distinguish these words, and therefore the P and S sounds are said to be different phonemes. A pair of words that are identical except for such a sound are known as a minimal pair; this is the most frequent demonstration that two sounds are separate phonemes. If no minimal pair can be found to demonstrate that two sounds are distinct, it may be that they are allophones. Allophones are variant phones (i.e., sounds) that are not recognized as distinct by a speaker, and are not meaningfully different in the language, and yet are perceived as "the same". This is especially likely if they consistently occur in different environments. For example, the "dark" L sound at the end of the English word "wool" is quite different from the "light" L sound at the beginning of the word "leaf", but this difference is meaningless in English, and is determined by whether the sound is at the beginning or end of a word. A native English speaker might have a hard time hearing the difference at first, but in Turkish the difference between "light" and "dark" L is sufficient to distinguish words. That is, they are two separate phonemes in Turkish, but allophones of a single phoneme in English. The phonemic relationship of two sounds may not be obvious to a non-native speaker, which is why minimal pairs and an understanding of phonetic environments are important. For example, in Korean, there is a phoneme /r/ that is a flapped r between vowels, and is an l-sound next to other consonants. These sound very different to an English speaker, who is attuned to hearing them because the differences are meaningful in English. However, the native speaker has learned from an early age to filter out the difference, as they are not meaningful in their language. In Korean, for instance, it is impossible to distinguish the two words "ram" and "lam", despite the fact that both R and L sounds occur in the language. The exact number of phonemes in English depends on the speaker and the method of determining phoneme vs. allophone, but estimates typically range from 40 to 45, which is above average across all languages. Pirahã has only 10, while !Xóõ has 141. Depending on the language and the alphabet used, a phoneme may be written consistently with one letter; however there are many exceptions to this rule — see Writing systems below. Some languages make use of pitch for the precise same purpose. In this case, the tones used are called tonemes. Some languages distinguish words made up of the same phonemes (and tonemes) by using different durations of some elements, which are called chronemes. However, the chroneme is not employed by the majority of scholars working on languages with distinctive duration, and the term itself may not even be recognized by most linguists. Usually, long vowels and consonants are represented either by a length indicator or doubling of the sound in question. In sign languages, phonemes may be classified as Tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), Dez (the hand shape, from designator), Sig (the motion, from signation), and with some researchers, Ori (orientation). Facial expressions and mouthing are also phonemic.

Notation

A transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a languages is said to be phonemic. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two English L's, is said to be phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ]. The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant sound in the word "phoneme" would be written as . In other words, the graphemes are <ph>, but this digraph represents one sound . Allophones, real speech variants of a phoneme, are often denoted in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and then placed in square brackets ([ ]) to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant brackets (/ /). The conventions of orthography are then kept separate from both phonemes and allophones by the use of the markers < > to enclose the spelling. The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and extended sets adapted to a particular language are often used by linguists to write phonemes of oral languages, with the principle being one symbol equals one categorical sound. Due to problems displaying some symbols in the early days of the Internet, systems such as X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum were developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text. As of 2004, any modern web browser can display IPA symbols (as long as the operating system provides the appropriate fonts), and we use this system in this article. The only published set of phonemic symbols for a sign language is the Stokoe notation developed for American Sign Language, which has since been applied to British Sign Language by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages by Adam Kendon. However, there are several phonetic systems, such as SignWriting.

Examples

Examples of phonemes in the English language would include sounds from the set of English consonants, like and . These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. However, phonemes might not be so apparent in written English, such as when they are typically represented with combined letters, called digraphs, like <sh> (pronounced ) or <ch> (pronounced ). To see a list of the phonemes in the English language, see IPA for English. Two sounds that may be allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in , and non-aspirated as in . However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated . As another example, there is no distinction between and in Japanese, there is only one phoneme in Japanese, although the Japanese has allophones that make it sound more like an , , or to English speakers. The sounds and are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish. (as in run) and (as in rung) are phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian and Spanish. An important phoneme is the chroneme, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Italian or Australian English use it after only one (in the case of Italian, consonants; in the case of Australian, vowels).

Arguments against the phoneme

Rather than a basic mental unit of language, some think that the phoneme may well be a perceptual artifact of alphabetic literacy (see the terms Phonemic awareness and Phonological awareness). If not that, it may be an epiphenomenal aspect to listening removed from face-to-face encounters, that is, text-like listening (qv phone and feature). It could be said that the unit of the phoneme is a necessary construct if we wish to set a dynamic, complex spoken language into static, written form expressed at a sub-syllabic level, though the model is a simplification and no where near phonologically or phonetically complete. The phoneme has the theoretical weakness from the perspective of phonology in that it uses, in part, lexical criteria to determine something that is supposed to be phonological (i.e., minimal pairs of words to point out phonological categories). Much of phonology, while accepting the phoneme as possible model or unit of language for description, has largely moved past the segmental phoneme as a basic unit of speech, of speech processing or of language acquisition. This is because the concept of the 'feature' is viewed as beneath the level of the phoneme while also spanning across segments. Meanwhile, attempts at capturing a phonological picture of the psychological control and structure underlying real speech flounder on the inadequacies of the phoneme for such purposes (that is, the phoneme can not account for co-articulation or assimilation of controlled speech, among other phenomena). However, the term, though variably defined and delimited, remains a widely and uncritically accepted concept in foreign language teaching and native literacy (especially for alphabetic languages, such as English).

Restricted phonemes

A restricted phoneme is a phoneme that can only occur in a certain environment: There are restrictions as to where it can occur. English has several restricted phonemes:
- , as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning. (In many other languages, such as Swahili, can start a word.)
- occurs only at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end. (A few languages such as Arabic allow /h/ at the ends of words.)
- In many American dialects with the cot-caught merger, occurs only before /r/, /l/, and in the diphthong .
- In non-rhotic dialects, /r/ can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word or before a consonant.
- Under most interpretations, and occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable. However, many phonologists interpret a word like boy as either or .

Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification

Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they don't contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized. In English there are three nasal phonemes, , as shown by the minimal triplet, However, these sounds are not contrastive before plosives such as . Although all three phones appear before plosives, for example in limp, lint, link, only one of these may appear before each of the plosives. That is, the distinction is neutralized before each of the plosives :
- Only occurs before ,
- only before , and
- only before . Thus these phonemes are not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists, there is no evidence as to what the underlying representation might be. If we hypothesize that we are dealing with only a single underlying nasal, there is no reason to pick one of the three phonemes over the other two. (In some languages there is only one phonemic nasal anywhere, and due to obligatory assimilation, it surfaces as in just these environments, so this idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.) In certain schools of phonology, such a neutralized distinction is known as an archiphoneme (Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school is often associated with this analysis.). Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter. Following this convention, the neutralization of before could be notated as |N|, and limp, lint, link would be represented as |lɪNp, lɪNt, lɪNk|. (The |pipes| indicate underlying representation.) Other ways this archiphoneme could be notated are |m-n-ŋ|, , or |n
- |. Another example from English is the neutralization of the plosives /k, g/ following /s/. Phonetically, the unaspirated tenuis plosive in sky is closer to English /g/, which is partially voiceless in initial position, than to aspirated /k/. This can be heard by comparing the sky with this guy; also, in the speech of young children who are not yet able to produce consonant clusters, they often pronounce sky as what sounds like to adult ears. That is, /k/ and /g/ are constrastive word initially, But not after an /s/, Thus one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the plosive in sky is /skai/ without aspiration, or /sgai/ without voicing. This neutralization can instead be represented as an archiphoneme |G|, in which case the underlying representation of sky would be |sGai|. Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of underspecification. Phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are underspecified segments. In Tuvan, phonemic vowels are specified with the features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified. Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on vowel harmony. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme ; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an ; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an . This can been seen in the following words: It should be noted that not all phonologists accept the concept of archiphonemes. Many doubt that it reflects how people process language.

Non-phonemes

Prothesis, epenthesis and paragoge due to phonotactics add sounds into words without adding meaning. Nevertheless, the sound is added, and thus the phoneme status may be ambiguous. For example, Spanish prothetic e- must be added before consonant clusters, e.g. estres.

Phonological extremes

Of all the sounds that a human vocal tract can create, different languages vary considerably in the number of these sounds that are considered to be distinctive phonemes in the speech of that language. Ubyx and some dialects of Abkhaz have only two phonemic vowels, and many Native American languages have three. On other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has fourteen vowel qualities, twelve of which may occur long or short, for twenty-six oral vowels, plus six nasalized vowels, long and short, for thirty-eight vowels; while !Xóõ achieves thirty-one pure vowels—not counting vowel length, which it also has—by varying the phonation. Rotokas has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-seven, and Ubyx eighty-one. French has no phonemic tone or stress, while several of the Kam-Sui languages have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages, Wobe, has been claimed to have fourteen, though this is disputed. The total number of phonemes in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones). These may range from familiar sounds like , , or to very unusual ones produced in extraordinary ways (see: Click consonant, phonation, airstream mechanism). The English language itself uses a rather large set of thirteen to twenty-two vowels, including diphthongs, though its twenty-two to twenty-six consonants are close to average. (There are twenty-one consonant and five vowel letters in the English alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel sounds.) The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels . The most common consonants are . A very few languages lack one of these: standard Hawai‘ian lacks , Mohawk lacks and , Hupa lacks both and a simple , colloquial Samoan lacks and , while Rotokas and Quileute lack and . While most of these languages have very small inventories, Quileute and Hupa have quite complex consonant systems. The ways that sounds are pronounced can vary slightly from language to language even if the same IPA symbol is used. For example, the Finnish word maat ("countries") sounds different from the British English (Received Pronunciation) word mart even though both are transcribed as IPA [http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/hyfl/projektit/vokaalikartat_eng.html#sweswedish_vowels]; the Spanish word sin ("without") has a somewhat different vowel from the American English seen though both are transcribed as .

Writing systems

In a phonemic writing system, a given symbol represents a single phoneme and each phoneme is represented by a single symbol. This may differ from a phonetic orthography, which only requires that the spelling be unambiguously determined by the pronunciation, and the pronunciation unambiguously indicated by the spelling. English spelling is the classic example of an nonphonemic, and indeed unphonetic, spelling system. Welsh and Irish are, by contrast, among the more predictable orthographies among languages using the Latin alphabet. In French, rules to predict pronunciation from spelling are quite simple and have few exceptions, as long as there are some clues such as context or part of speech, but guessing spelling from pronunciation is quite difficult, especially because of the many silent letters. Italian, Spanish and especially Finnish have a very close letter-to-phoneme correspondence. Karelian has a perfectly phonemic spelling system, as it has no standard language, but it has a complete spelling system. However, the split between phonemic and nonphonemic orthographies is exaggerated. All languages are written with conventions that represent both meaning and pronunciation. This is true at both ends of the scale: Chinese characters are first and foremost symbols of words, but they have some phonetic information as well. At the other extreme, there are a few orthographies which are perfect phonemic representations of an artificial national standard, but since they make no effort to represent variation in pronunciation within the language, they too are conventional. Other languages fall somewhere in between. Although English is often given as an example of an unphonetic orthography, its system is nowhere near to being as purely conventional a system as Chinese writing is. English spelling conveys etymological information, but also vast amounts of phonetic information. Spanish is often given as an example of a phonetic orthography, but it has numerous imperfections including silent letters. It is, at least, possible to tell the correct pronunciation of any written Spanish word. Another phonemic orthography is Serbian. Its phonemicity was established by Serbian "Webster" Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. He followed a strict phonemic principle, which is best told by his own words: "Write as you speak and read as it is written.". Hindi, a descendant of Sanskrit, is an example of phonetic language written with a non-Roman Alphabet.

External links

- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm What is a phoneme? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAllophone.htm What is an allophone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhone.htm What is a phone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneticallySimilarSegm.htm What is a phonetically similar segment? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMinimalPair.htm What is a minimal pair? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsComplementaryDistributio.htm What is complementary distribution? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnEnvironment.htm What is an environment? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsContrastInIdenticalEnvir.htm What is an contrast in identical environments? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsContrastInAnalogousEnvir.htm What is an contrast in analogous environments? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfMorphemeMorphAllom.htm Comparison of morpheme-morph-allomorph & phoneme-phone-allophone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Phonology.htm What is phonology? (SIL)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=phoneme Phoneme (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=allophony Allophony (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=transcription Transcription (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Grapheme-phoneme+conversion Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Phoneme+restoration Phoneme Restoration (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://moodle.ed.uiuc.edu/wiked/index.php/Phonemic_awareness phonemic awareness] Category:Phonetics Category:Phonology zh-min-nan:Im-sò· ko:낱소리 ja:音素

Writing system

A writing system, also called a script, is a type of symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language. language

General properties

Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated language in order to successfully read and comprehend the text. Contrast this with other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps, and mathematics, which do not necessarily depend upon prior knowledge of a given language in order to extract their meaning. Every human community possesses language, a feature regarded by many as an innate and defining condition of humankind. However, the development and adoption of writing systems has occurred only sporadically. Once established, writing systems are on the whole modified more slowly than their spoken counterparts, and often preserve features and expressions which are no longer current in the discourse of the speech community. The great benefit conferred by writing systems is their ability to maintain a persistent record of information expressed in a language, which can be retrieved independently of the initial act of formulation. All writing systems require: :
- a set of defined base elements or symbols (termed characters or graphemes); :
- a set of rules and conventions understood and shared by a community, which arbitrarily assign meaning to the base elements, their ordering, and relations to one another; :
- a language (generally a spoken language) whose constructions are represented and able to be recalled by the interpretation of these elements and rules; :
- some physical means of distinctly representing the symbols by application to a permanent or semi-permanent medium, so that they may be interpreted (usually visually, but tactile systems have also been devised).

Basic terminology

The study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines in the examination of individual scripts, and as such the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field. The generic term text may be used to refer to an individual product of a writing system. The act of composing a text may be referred to as writing, and the act of interpreting the text as reading. In the study of writing systems, orthography refers to the method and rules of observed writing structure (literal meaning, "correct writing"), and in particular for alphabetic systems, includes the concept of spelling. A grapheme is the technical term coined to refer to the specific base or atomic units of a given writing system. Graphemes are the minimally significant elements which taken together comprise the set of "building blocks" out of which texts of a given writing system may be constructed, along with rules of correspondence and use. The concept is similar to that of the phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. For example, in the Latin-based writing system of standard contemporary English, examples of graphemes include the majuscule and minuscule forms of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet (corresponding to various phonemes), marks of punctuation (mostly non-phonemic), and a few other symbols such as those for numerals (logograms for numbers). Note that an individual grapheme may be represented in a wide variety of ways, where each variation is visually distinct in some regard, but all are interpreted as representing the "same" grapheme. These individual variations are known as allographs of a grapheme (compare with the term allophone used in linguistic study). For example, the minuscule letter a has different allographs when written as a cursive, block, or typed letter. The selection between different allographs may be influenced by the medium used, the writing instrument, the stylistic choice of the writer, and the largely unconscious features of an individual's handwriting. The terms glyph, sign and character are sometimes used to refer to a grapheme. Common usage varies from discipline to discipline; compare cuneiform sign, Maya glyph, Chinese character. The glyphs of most writing systems are made up of lines (or strokes) and are therefore called linear, but there are glyphs in non-linear writing systems made up of other types of marks, such as Cuneiform and Braille. Writing systems are conceptual systems, as are the languages to which they refer. Writing systems may be regarded as complete according to the extent to which they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language.

History of writing systems

Proto-writing

Before there was writing, there was proto-writing. However few surviving examples exist, with some authorities questioning the inscriptions as early writing at all. Some believe them to be ideographic, early mnemonic devices of sorts, which may have been invented over time by creative prehistoric individuals. The two best known examples are:
- Old European Script, 6000 BC - 4000 BC
- Tărtăria inscriptions, 4500 BC Old European script is disputed as actual proto-writing versus symbolic but non-linguistic artwork.

Invention of writing

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC. The first writing system is generally believed to have been the Sumerian script, which developed into cuneiform. However, Egyptian hieroglyphs and the undeciphered Proto-Elamite script also date to this era. Other early writing systems likely influenced by these innovations include the undeciphered Indus valley script; though its status as a writing system is unclear. The Chinese script may have originated independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian writing systems of the Americas (including among others Olmec and Mayan) are also generally believed to have had independent origins. The first pure alphabets emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets).

Types of writing system

The oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories: logographic, syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely. The term complex system is sometimes used to describe those where the admixture makes classification problematic.

Type of writing system	What each symbol represents	Example
Logographic	morpheme	Chinese hanzi
Syllabic	syllable	Japanese kana
Alphabetic	phoneme (consonant or vowel)	Latin
Abugida	phoneme (consonant+vowel)	Indian devanagari
Abjad	phoneme (consonant)	Arabic
Featural	phonetic feature	Korean hangul

See also: phonemic and phonetic orthography.

Logographic writing systems

Main article: Logogram A logogram is a single written character which represents a complete grammatical word. Most Chinese characters are classified as logograms. As each character represents a single word (or, more precisely, a morpheme), many logograms are required to write all the words of language. The vast array of logograms and the memorization of what they mean are the major disadvantage of the logographic systems over alphabetic systems. However, since the meaning is inherent to the symbol, the same logographic system can theoretically be used to represent different languages. In practice, this is only true for closely related languages, like the Chinese languages, as syntactical constraints reduce the portability of a given logographic system. Both Korean and Japanese use Chinese logograms in their writing systems, with most of the symbols carrying the same or similar meanings. However, the semantics, and especially the grammar, are different enough that a Chinese text is not readily understandable by a Japanese or Korean reader. While most languages do not use wholly logographic writing systems many languages use some logograms. A good example of modern western logograms are the Arabic numerals — everyone who uses those symbols understands what 1 means whether he or she calls it one, eins, uno, or ichi. Other western logograms include the ampersand &, used for and, and the at sign @ , used in many contexts for at. Logograms are sometimes called ideograms, a word that refers to symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas, but linguists avoid this use, as Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, symbols which include an element that represents the meaning and element that represents the pronunciation. Some nonlinguists distinguish between lexigraphy and ideography, where symbols in lexigraphies represent words, and symbols in ideographies represent words or morphemes. The most important (and, to a degree, the only surviving) modern logographic writing system is the Chinese one, whose characters are used, with varying degrees of modification, in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other east Asian languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Mayan writing system are also systems with certain logographic features, although they have marked phonetic features as well, and are no longer in current use. See List of writing systems for a list of predominantly-logographic writing systems.

Syllabic writing systems

Main article: Syllabary As logographic writing systems use a single symbol for an entire word, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, or just a vowel alone. In a true syllabary there is no systematic graphic similarity between phonetically related characters (though some do have graphic similarity for the vowels). That is, the characters for "ke", "ka", and "ko" have no similarity to indicate their common "k"-ness. Compare abugida, where each grapheme typically represents a syllable but where characters representing related sounds are similar graphically (typically, a common consonantal base is annotated in a more or less consistent manner to represent the vowel in the syllable). Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. The English language, on the other hand, allows complex syllable structures, with a relative large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. To write English using a syllabary, every possible syllable in English would have to have a separate symbol, and whereas the number of possible syllables in Japanese is no more than one hundred or so, in English there are many thousands. Other languages that use syllabic writing include Mycenaean Greek (Linear B) and Native American languages such as Cherokee. Several languages of the Ancient Near East used forms of cuneiform, which is a syllabary with some non-syllabic elements. See List of writing systems for a list of syllabaries.

Alphabetic writing systems

Main article: Alphabet An alphabet is a small set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken language. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet. In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Each language has general rules that govern the association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed. Perfectly phonological alphabets are very easy to use and learn, and languages that have them (for example, Finnish) have much lower barriers to literacy than languages such as English, which has a very complex and irregular spelling system. As languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language. In modern times, when linguists invent a writing system for a language that didn't previously have one, the goal is usually to make perfectly phonological alphabet. An example of such writing systems is the "IPA" (International Phonetic Alphabet). See alphabet for more information about alphabets. See List of writing systems for a list of alphabetic writing systems.

Abjads

Main article: Abjad The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from regular alphabets in that they only have characters for consonantal sounds. Vowels are not usually marked in abjad. All known abjads (except maybe Tifinagh) belong to the Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the original Northern Linear Abjad. The reason for this is that Semitic languages and the related Berber languages have a morphemic structure which makes the denotation of vowels redundant in most cases. Some abjads (like Arabic and Hebrew) have markings for vowels as well, but only use them in special contexts, such as for teaching. Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full alphabets, the most famous case being the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad. This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-Semitic language. The term abjad takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet's consonants Alif, Bá, Jim, Dál, though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic. Abjad is still the word for alphabet in Arabic and Indonesian. See List of writing systems for a list of abjad-based writing systems.

Abugidas

Main article: Abugida An abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. Thus, in an abugida there is no sign for "k", but instead one for "ka" (if "a" is the inherent vowel), and "ke" is written by modifying the "ka" sign in a way that is consistent with how one would modify "la" to get "le". In many abugidas the modification is the addition of a vowel sign, but other possibilities are imaginable (and used), such as rotation of the basic sign, addition of diacritical marks, and so on. The obvious contrast is with syllabaries, which have one distinct symbol per possible syllable, and the signs for each syllable have no systematic graphic similarity. The graphic similarity comes from the fact that most abugidas are derived from abjads, and the consonants make up the symbols with the inherent vowel, and the new vowel symbols are markings added on to the base symbol. The Ethiopic script is an abugida, although the vowel modifications in Ethiopic are not entirely systematic. Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics can be considered abugidas, although they are rarely thought of in those terms. The largest single group of abugidas is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ge'ez script used in some religious contexts. The term was coined by Peter T. Daniels. See List of writing systems for a list of abugida-based writing systems.

Featural writing systems

A featural script represents finer detail than an alphabet. Here symbols do not represent whole phonemes, but rather the elements (features) that make up the phonemes, such as voicing or its place of articulation. Theoretically, each feature could be written with a separate letter; and abjads or abugidas, or indeed syllabaries, could be featural, but the only prominent system of this sort is Korean Hangul. In Hangul, the featural symbols are combined into alphabetic letters, and these letters are in turn joined into syllabic blocks, so that the system combines three levels of phonological representation. See List of writing systems for a list of featural writing systems.

Directionality

Different scripts are written in different directions. The early alphabet could be written in any direction: either horizontal (left-to-right or right-to-left) or vertical (up or down). It could also be written boustrophedon: starting horizontally in one direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction. Egyptian hieroglyph is one such script, where the beginning of a line written horizontally was to be indicated by the direction in which animal and human idiograms are looking. The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, came to be written right-to-left. Many East Asian scripts, such as Chinese and Japanese, are written top-to-bottom, from the right to the left of the page. There are even scripts that are written from bottom to top, such as those formerly used in the Philippines and other Western Pacific Islands.

External links

- About African writing systems by the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library at Cornell University:
- http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/Welcome.html
- General about writing systems
- http://www.omniglot.com/index.htm
- [http://omniglot.com/writing/alphabetic.htm Alphabetic Writing Systems]
- Michael Everson's [http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/index.html Alphabets of Europe]
- The [http://www.unicode.org/ Unicode Consortium]
- [http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/wiki/ken/ATypographicOutcry A Typographic Outcry]: a curious perspective

References

- Coulmas, Florian. 1996. The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. 1996. The world's writing systems. ISBN 0-19-507-993-0.
- DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824810686
- Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 082481892X (paperback); ISBN 0824818423 (hardcover)
- Rogers, Henry. 2005. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-23463-2 (hardcover); ISBN 0-631-23464-0 (paperback)
- Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing Systems. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-1756-7 (paper), ISBN 0-8047-1254-9 (cloth).
- Smalley, W.A. (ed.) 1964. Orthography studies: articles on new writing systems, United Bible Society, London. Category:Writing writing system ja:文字 ko:문자 zh-min-nan:Bûn-jī hē-thóng

Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members. English example: The word "unbelievable" has three morphemes "un-", (negatory) a bound morpheme, "-believe-" a free morpheme, and "-able". "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.

Types of morphemes

- Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town-hall or dog-house) or they can stand alone, or "free". Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as /-z/, /-s/ or /-ɪz/.
- Bound morphemes like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Morphemes existing in only one bound form are known as "cranberry" ones, from the "cran" in that very word.
- Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on. (as in the dog morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme s becomes dogs).
- Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy", for example, to give "happiness".

External links

- [http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~l150web/index.html University of Oregon Linguistics Course: The Structure of English Words (LING150)]
- [http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~l150web/studyaid/ Morpheme Study Aid]

Reference

- Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory, Blackwell, Oxford 1992 Category:Linguistic morphology ko:형태소 ja:形態素

Alpha (letter)

:For other uses, see Alpha. Alpha (uppercase Α, lowercase α) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 1. It derives from the Phoenician letter 'Aleph 'Aleph. Letters that arose from Alpha include the Latin A and the Cyrillic letter A. Plutarch in Moralia presents a discussion on the question of why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet. Plutarch's speaker suggests that Cadmus, the Phoenician who reputedly have settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, "placed alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox, which they, like Hesiod, considered not the second or third, but the first of necessities." This refers to a passage in Works and Days by Hesiod, who advised the early Greek farmers, "First get an ox, then a woman." A simpler explanation is that it was the first letter in the Phoenician alphabet. According to Plutarch's natural order of attribution of the vowels to the planets, alpha was connected with the Moon. Oxen were also associated with the Moon in both early Sumerian and Egyptian religious symbolism due to the crescent shape of their horns. Alpha, both as a symbol and term, is used to refer to or describe a variety of things, including the first or most significant occurrence of something. Jesus declares himself to be the "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." (Revelation 22:13, KJV, and see also 1:8). The uppercase letter alpha is not generally used as a symbol because it tends to be rendered identically to the uppercase latin A. The lower-case letter α is used as the symbol for:
- Angular acceleration in physics.
- The alpha particle and alpha decay in physics. Category:Greek letters als:Α ko:Α ja:Α

Beta (letter)

:This page is about the letter β itself, for other uses of Beta or β see Beta (disambiguation) Beta (upper case Β, lower case β) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Beth Beth. In Modern Greek, it is pronounced , but in Ancient Greek, it was pronounced . In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 2. Beta should not be confused with esszet (ß), a similar-looking but unrelated letter in German language orthography. The Modern Greek name of the letter is . The American pronunciation is whereas the British pronunciation is . See: American and British English differences, IPA Letters that arose from Beta include the Roman B and the Cyrillic letters Be and Ve.
Uses of β
:See also Beta (disambiguation).
- From its position in the Greek alphabet, it often stands for the second in a series; e.g., β Centauri for the second brightest star in constellation Centaurus.
- β is the the symbol for the voiced bilabial fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet
- Beta version in used to describe something, typically software that is still in the testing stages.
- Beta is the second highest caste in Aldous Huxley's dystopic satire Brave New World.
- Bipolar junction transistor, where β is the symbol for the DC common emitter current gain.
- Plasma, where β is the symbol for the ratio of particle to magnetic field energy density.
- Beta-function in a quantum field theory.
- Beta coefficient in finance.
See also

- ß, in German language orthography which can be confused with β. Category:Greek letters als:Β ko:Β ja:Β

Non-linear writing

Non-linear writing is writing which made up of marks other than lines, to be distinguished from linear writing. Cuneiform is probably the earliest non-linear writing. Its symbols are different-shaped impressions, formed by pressing the sharpened end of a reed stylus into moist clay, not scratching the clay in lines as had been done previously. Arguably, the symbols of Chinese script might be considered non-linear since they are formed of brush strokes, which are not lines of uniform width. However, the essence of the characters can in fact be rendered by plain lines, so this remains an open question. The same argument applies to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Maya hieroglyphics, which are either painted with great detail or carved into stone. There are several non-linear adaptations of the Roman alphabet, based upon the principles of simple substitution ciphers. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the original linear symbols and the resulting new non-linear symbols. In the case of the Braille alphabet for the blind, the new symbols consist of raised bumps on the writing substrate, which can be paper, metal, plastic or Louis Braille's original leather. In the case of maritime signal flags, the symbols are individual flags with varied coloration. The pattern of encoded magnetic traces used in modern computers is also a substitution cipher for traditional linear alphabets. Although the magnetic traces may be evanescent, they are still permanent enough to be considered a permanent means of recording speech. Two early encoding schemes were the ASCII and the EBCDIC, and today there are dozens of variations. There are also impermanent substitution ciphers of the Latin alphabet, including:
- Morse Code,
- the alphabetic component of the various signed languages;
- two varieties of semaphore:
- one involving flags waved according to specific patterns;
- one involving stationary bars held at different prescribed angles. If writing is defined as a permanent means of recording information, then these systems do not qualify, since the symbols disappear as soon as they are used. Category:Writing systems

Braille

The Braille system, named after Louis Braille, is a method that the blind use to read and write. Each Braille character or "cell" is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle comprising of two columns of three dots each. A dot may be raised at any of the six positions to form many combinations. Counting the space, in which no dots are raised, there are sixty four such combinations. For reference purposes, a particular combination may be described by naming the positions where dots are raised, the positions being universally numbered 1 through 3 from top to bottom on the left, and 4 through 6 from top to bottom on the right. For example, dots 1-3-4 would describe a cell with three dots raised, at the top and bottom in the left column and on top of the right column. The Braille system was based on a method of communication originally developed by soldiers.

The Braille alphabet

Braille generally consists of cells of 6 raised dots arranged in a grid of two dots horizontally by three dots vertically. The dots are conventionally numbered 1, 2, 3 from the top of the leftward column and 4, 5, 6 from the top of the rightward column. rectangle The presence or absence of dots gives the coding for the symbol. Dot height is approximately 0.02 inches (0.5 mm); the horizontal and vertical spacing between dot centers within a braille cell is approximately 0.1 inches (2.5 mm); the blank space between dots on adjacent cells is approximately 0.15 inches (3.75 mm) horizontally and 0.2 inches (5.0 mm) vertically. A standard braille page is 11 inches by 11 inches and typically has a maximum of 40 to 42 braille cells per line and 25 lines. As originally conceived by Louis Braille, a sequence of characters, using the top 4 dots of the braille cell, represents letters "a" through "j". Dot 3 is added to each of the "a" through "j" symbols to give letters "k" through "t". Both of the bottom dots (dots 3 and 6) are added to the symbols for "a" through "e" to give letters "u", "v", "x", "y", and "z". The letter "w" is an exception to the pattern because French did not make use of the letter "w" at the time Louis Braille devised his alphabet, and thus he had no need to encode the letter "w". English braille codes the letters and punctuation, and some double letter signs and word signs directly, but capitalisation and numbers are dealt with by using a prefix symbol. In practice, Braille produced in the United Kingdom does not have capital letters. There are braille codes for representing shorthand (produced on a machine which embosses a paper tape) and for representing mathematics (Nemeth Braille) and musical notation (Braille music). Braille has been extended to an 8 dot code, particularly for use with braille embossers and refreshable braille displays. In 8 dot braille the additional dots are added at the bottom of the cell, giving a matrix 4 dots high by 2 dots wide. The additional dots are given the numbers 7 (for the lower-left dot) and 8 (for the lower-right dot). 8-dot braille has the advantages that the case of an individual letter is directly coded in the cell containing the letter and that all the printable ASCII characters can be represented in a single cell. All 256 possible combinations of 8 dots are encoded by the Unicode standard. Braille may be produced using a "slate" and a "stylus" in which each dot is created from the back of the page, writing in mirror image, by hand, or it may be produced on a braille typewriter or "Perkins Brailler", or produced by a Braille Embosser attached to a computer. It may also be rendered using a refreshable Braille display.

Letters and numbers

Other symbols

Unicode rendering table

Braille transcription

Hyphen Although it is possible to transcribe Braille by simply substituting the equivalent Braille character for its printed equivalent, such a character-by-character transcription, known as Grade 1 Braille, is used only by beginners. Braille characters are much larger than their printed equivalents, and the standard 11" by 11" (28 cm × 28 cm) page has room for only 25 lines of 40 characters. To reduce space and increase reading speed, virtually all Braille books are transcribed in what is known as Grade 2 Braille, which uses a system of contractions to reduce space and speed the process of reading. As with most human linguistic activities, Grade 2 Braille embodies a complex system of customs, styles, and practices. The Library of Congress's Instruction Manual for Braille Transcribing runs to nearly 200 pages. Braille transcription is skilled work and Braille transcribers need to pass certification tests. The system of Grade 2 Braille contractions begins with a set of 23 words which are contracted to single characters. Thus the word but is contracted to the single letter b, can to c, do to d, and so on. Even this simple rule creates issues requiring special cases; for example, d is, specifically, an abbreviation of the verb do; the noun do representing the note of the musical scale is a different word, and must be spelled out. Portions of words may be contracted, and many rules govern this process. For example, the character with dots 2-3-5 (the letter "f" lowered in the braille cell) stands for "ff" when used in the middle of a word. At the beginning of a word, this same character stands for the word "to" although the character is written in braille with no space following it. At the end of a word, the same character represents an exclamation point. The contraction rules take into account the linguistic structure of the word; thus, contractions are not to be used when their use would alter the usual braille form of a base word to which a prefix or suffix has been added. And some portions of the transcription rules are not fully codified and rely on the judgement of the transcriber. Thus, when the contraction rules permit the same word in more than one way, preference is given to "the contraction that more nearly approximates correct pronunciation." Grade 3 Braille is a system that includes many additional contractions, almost a shorthand; it is not used for publication, but is used mostly for individuals for their personal convenience. The current series of Canadian banknotes have raised dots on the banknotes that indicate the denomination and can be easily identified by visually impaired people; this 'tactile feature' does not use standard Braille but, instead, a system developed in consultation with blind and visually impaired Canadians after research indicated that not all potential users read Braille. Though Braille is thought to be the main way blind people read and write, in Britain (for example) out of the reported 2 million visually impaired population, it is estimated that only around 15-20 thousand people use Braille. Younger people are turning to electronic text on computers instead; a more portable communication method that they can also use with their friends. A debate has started on how to make Braille more attractive and for more teachers to be available to teach it.

Braille for other scripts

There are many extensions of Braille for additional letters with diacritics, such as ç, ô, é. When Braille is adapted to languages which do not use the Latin alphabet, the blocks are generally assigned to the new alphabet according to how it is transliterated into the Latin alphabet, and the alphabetic order of the national script (and therefore the natural order of Latin Braille) is disregarded. Such is the case with Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese. In Greek, for example, gamma is written as Latin g, despite the fact that it has the alphabetic position of c; Hebrew beth, the second letter of the alphabet and cognate with the Latin letter b, is instead written v, as it is commonly pronounced; Russian ts is written as c, which is the usual letter for /ts/ in the Slavic languages which use the Latin alphabet; and Arabic f is written as f, despite being historically p, and occurring in that part of the Arabic alphabet (between historic o and q). Greater differences occur in Chinese Braille. In the case of Mandarin Braille, which is based on Zhuyin rather than the Latin Pinyin alphabet, the traditional Latin Braille values values are used for initial consonants and the simple vowels. However, there are additional blocks for the tones, diphthongs, and vowel + consonant combinations. Cantonese Braille is also based on Latin Braille for many of the initial consonants and simple vowels (based on Romanizations of a century ago), but the blocks pull double duty, with different values depending on whether they're placed in syllable-initial or syllable-final position. For instance, the block for Latin k represents old-style Cantonese k (g in Yale and other modern Romanizations) when initial, but aak when final, while Latin j represents Cantonese initial j but final oei. However, at least two adaptations of Braille have completely reassigned the Latin sound values of the blocks. These are:
- Japanese Braille
- Korean Braille In Japanese Braille, alphabetic signs for a consonant and vowel are combined into a single syllabic block; in Korean Braille, the consonants have different syllable-initial and syllable-final forms. These modifications made Braille much more compatible with Japanese kana and Korean hangul, but meant that the Latin sound values could not be maintained.

External links

- [http://www.afb.org/braille.asp Braille - American Foundation for the Blind]
- [http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/braille.html Braille for various scripts]
- [http://www.braillevirtual.fe.usp.br On-line Braille Course of University of São Paulo]
- [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2800.pdf Unicode reference glyphs for Braille patterns] (in PDF format)
- [http://yudit.org/download/fonts/UBraille/UBraille.ttf Free Unicode Braille TTF font (supports all Braille scripts)]
- [http://www.travelphrases.info/gallery/Fonts_Braille.html Free Unicode fonts which include Braille]
- [http://www.nyise.org/blind/irwin2.htm Robert B. Irwin's As I Saw It], 1955, gives a history of the "War of the Dots" that ultimately led to the adoption of the English form of the braille literary code in the United States and the demise of American braille and New York Point, its main competitors.
- [http://www.nlb-online.org The National Library for the Blind]
- [http://www.iceb.org/ubc.html Unified (English) Braille Code] (including information specific to British Braille)
- [http://www.brl.org/ebae/ English Braille: American Edition]
- [http://flaming-shadows.tripod.com/braille.htm Online Braille Generator]
- [http://www.brailler.com/braillehx.htm How Braille Began] -- a detailed history of Braille's origins and the people who supported and opposed the system. Category:Braille Category:Tactile alphabets Category:Assistive technology Category:Encodings Category:Blindness Kevin Charles ms:Braille ja:点字 th:อักษรเบรลล์

Morse code

Morse code is a method for transmitting information, using standardized sequences of short and long marks or pulses — commonly known as "dots and dashes" — for the letters, numerals and special characters of a message. Originally created for Samuel Morse's electric telegraph in the mid-1830s, it was also extensively used for early radio communication beginning in the 1890s. However, with the development of more advanced communications technologies, the use of Morse Code is now largely obsolete, although it is still employed for a few specialized purposes, including navigational radio beacons, and by CW (continuous wave) amateur radio operators. Morse code can be transmitted in a number of ways: originally as electrical pulses along a telegraph wire, but also as an audio tone, as a radio signal with short and long pulses or tones, or as a mechanical or visual signal (e.g. a flashing light). Because Morse code is transmitted using just two states — on and off — it was an early form of a digital code. International Morse Code is composed of six elements: # short mark or dot (·) # longer mark or dash (-) # intra-character gap (between the dots and dashes in a character) # short gap (between letters) # medium gap (between words) # long gap (between sentences) However, the variable length of the Morse characters made it hard to adapt to automated communication, so it was largely replaced by more standardized formats, including the Baudot code and ASCII. What is called Morse code today actually differs somewhat from what was originally developed by Morse and his assistant, Alfred Vail. In 1848 a refinement of the code sequences, including changes to eleven of the letters, was developed in Germany and eventually adopted as the worldwide standard as "International Morse". Morse's original code specification, largely limited to use in the United States, became known as Railroad or American Morse code, and is now very rarely used. The short and long elements of Morse code have traditionally been referred to as "dots" and "dashes". However, a later convention developed which reflects the sound of audio transmissions, and refers to dashes as "dah", and dots as "di", unless the dot is the final symbol in the character, in which case it is voiced as "dit".

Development

Beginning in the mid-1830s, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed an electric telegraph, which used electrical currents to control an electromagnet that was located at the receiving end of the transmission wire. The technological limits of the time made it impossible to print individual characters in a readable form, so the inventors had to devise an alternate method of communication. Beginning in 1837, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone operated electric telegraphs in England, which also controlled electromagnets in the receivers, however, in their systems needle pointers were rotated in order to indicate the characters being sent. In contrast, Morse and Vail's initial telegraph system, which first went into operation in 1844, marked a paper tape — when an electrical current was transmitted, the receiver's electromagnet rotated an armature, so that it began to scratch a moving tape, and when the current was removed the receiver retracted the armature, so that portion of the tape was left unmarked. The Morse code was developed so that operators could translate the indentions marked on the paper tape into text messages. Initially, Morse had planned to only transmit numerals, and use a dictionary to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. However, the code was expanded to include letters and special characters, so it could be used for more complete messages. The shorter marks were called "dots", and the longer ones "dashes", and the letters most commonly used in the English language were assigned the shortest sequences. In the original Morse telegraphs, the receiver's armature made a clicking noise as it moved into and out of position for marking the tape. Operators soon learned to directly read the clicks as the beginning and end of dots and dashes, meaning that it was no longer necessary to use the tape. When Morse code was adopted to radio, the dots and dashes were normally sent as short and long tones. Morse messages are generally transmitted by a hand-operated device such as a telegraph key, so there are variations introduced by the skill of the sender and receiver — more experienced operators can send and receive at faster speeds. In general, any code representing written symbols as variable length signals can be called a Morse code, but the term is used specifically for the two kinds of Morse code used for the English alphabet and associated symbols. Telegraph companies charged based on the length of the message sent. Elaborate commercial codes were developed that encoded common phrases in five-letter groups that were sent as single words. Examples: BYOXO ("Are you trying to crawl out of it?"), LIOUY ("Why do you not answer my question?"), and AYYLU ("Not clearly coded, repeat more clearly."). The letters of these five-letter code words were sent individually using Morse code. In computer networking terminology one would say the commercial code is layered on top of Morse code, which in turn is layered on top of binary code, which in turn is layered on top of a physical telegraph wire. Still in use in Amateur Radio are the Q code and Z code; they were and are used by the operators themselves for service information like link quality, frequency changes, and telegram numbering. When considered as a standard for information encoding, Morse code had a successful lifespan that has not yet been surpassed by any other electronic encoding scheme. Morse code was used as an international standard for maritime communication until 1999 when it was replaced by the Global Maritime Distress Safety System. When the French navy ceased using Morse code in 1997, the final message transmitted was "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence." See also: international distress frequency Recently a few widely publicized speed contests have been held between expert Morse code operators and expert cellphone SMS text messaging users (see external links). Morse code has consistently won the contests, leading to speculation that cellphone manufacturers may eventually build a Morse code interface into cellphones. The interface would automatically translate the Morse code input into text so that it could be sent to any SMS capable cellphone so therefore the receiver of the message need not know Morse code to read it. Other speculated applications include taking an existing assistive application of Morse code and using the vibrating alert feature on the cellphone to translate SMS messages to Morse code for silent, hands free "reading" of the incoming messages. Several cellphones already have informative audible Morse code ring tones and alert messages, for example: many Nokia cellphones have an option to beep SMS in Morse code when it receives an SMS text message. These kinds of innovations could lead to a Morse code revival. There are third party applications already available for some cellphones that allow Morse code input for sending SMS (see external links).

Modern International Morse code

The Modern International Morse code was invented by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848 and used for the telegraphy between Hamburg and Cuxhaven in Germany. After some minor changes in 1865 it has been standardised at the International Telegraphy congress in Paris (1865), and later normed by the ITU as International Morse code. International Morse code is still in use today, although it has become almost exclusively the province of amateur radio operators. Until 2003 the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) mandated Morse code proficiency as part of the amateur radio licensing procedure throughout the world. In some countries, certain parts of the amateur radio bands are still reserved for transmission of Morse code signals only. Since Morse relies on only an (on-off keyed) radio signal, it requires less complex equipment than other forms of radio communication, and it can be used in very high noise / low signal environments. It also requires less bandwidth than voice communications, typically 100-150 Hz, compared to the roughly 4000 Hz of single-sideband voice. The extensive use of pro-signs, Q codes, and restricted format of typical messages facilitates communication between amateur radio operators who do not share a common mother tongue and would have great difficulty in communicating using voice modes. Morse code is also very popular among QRP operators for enabling very long distance, low-power communication. Readability can be sustained by trained operators even though the signal is only faintly readable. This level of "penetration" is due to the fact that all transmitted energy is concentrated in a very small bandwidth making the use of a narrow receiver bandwidth practical. A narrow bandwidth receiver uses filters to exclude interference on frequencies close to the desired frequency. Concentrating the transmitted energy in a small bandwidth gives the signal a "spectral brightness" that is much higher than the average natural noise (but see also spread spectrum). In the United States until 1991, a demonstration of the ability to send and receive Morse code at 5 words per minute (WPM) was required to receive an FCC amateur radio license. Demonstration of this ability is still required for the privilege to use the HF bands. Until 2000, proficiency at the 20 WPM level was required to receive the highest level of amateur