Writing Systems of the World
世界文字系統
Fall 2023 Thursday 14:10-17:00 文學院 (Humanities) 413
編號 (Course code number): 1309104
UPDATED 2023/10/12
Me:
James Myers (麥傑)
Office: 文學院247
Tel: x31506
WWW: https://lngmyers.ccu.edu.tw/
Office hours: Wednesday, or by appointment (made at least 24 hours ahead)
Goals:
Unlike spoken and signed languages, writing systems are not universal and depend on the natural languages that they transcribe. For these reasons, writing systems are often neglected by linguists, but fortunately not always! In this class we will discuss what writing systems are (and aren’t), how they are (or aren’t) related to each other, the various ways in which they can be structured, how they are used within and across social groups, how they are processed in human brains and in computers, and how they are learned by children and adults. Understanding writing systems will give students a new appreciation for the creativity and diversity of human cultures, challenge their thinking about the nature of language, and provide them with practical tools for further research and applications in education and computer science.
Grading:
20% Class participation
50% Leading discussion
30% Presentations (12/28)
What the class is like:
This is a discussion class, so class preparation means that you read each week’s reading and try to say something useful during the discussion. If you’re naturally shy, this is your chance to practice pretending that you’re not! I’ll help quiet down the loudmouths so you can speak up.
Each week will have a discussion leader (usually not me) who will give everybody a discussion handout (upload it as a PDF file to the E-Course system by 12 noon on the day of discussion). This is one page of questions designed to get us to discuss, rather than lecturing us or just having us look at this or that sentence in the reading. The questions should be well-organized and help us focus on the most important things, including linking the reading with our other readings or with real-life issues, while not neglecting smaller details if you think they need clarification.
You need to choose your own research topic by 11/16, though you should email/visit me to check out ideas earlier than that if you’re not sure. Your research should be original, not just a literature review. For example, you could run a psycholinguistic or acquisition experiment, collect sociolinguistic data, critique the standard typology, perform a grammatical analysis, or design a computational model, but many many other topics are possible too!
On 12/21 there will be an open discussion, when we can discuss anything relating to the class, including your own research progress. On 12/28 (the last class), you’ll give a graded presentation about your research (share your presentation file with everybody via the E-Course system by 12 noon before class). My grading will focus mainly on your logic (does it make sense?) and theory (did you learn stuff from this class?).
As usual, don’t plagiarize: give credit for all of your unoriginal ideas! Also, if you’re sick on your discussion/presentation day, don’t come to class, but instead, upload your file by 12 noon on class day and let me know by email so I can present for you (unless I’m also sick, of course).
Schedule
* marks due dates for things relating to your paper
|
Week |
Topic/Activity |
Readings |
Leaders |
|
9/7 |
Why study writing systems? |
|
|
|
9/14 |
What is writing? |
Coulmas (2003) |
Myers |
|
9/21 |
Logographic systems |
Gong
(2017) |
(see full list in E-Course...) |
|
9/28 |
Syllabaries |
Robinson
(2002) |
|
|
10/5 |
Typhoon day (no class) |
|
|
|
10/12 |
Alphabets |
Haudricourt
(2010) |
|
|
10/19 |
Abjads and abugidas |
Karoonboonyanan
(1999) |
|
|
10/26 |
Other types of systems |
Kettunen
& Helmke (2005) |
|
|
11/2 |
Writing signs and music |
Grushkin
(2017) |
|
|
11/9 |
Grammatical analyses |
McCawley
(1994) |
|
|
11/16 |
*Discuss presentation topics |
|
|
|
11/23 |
Sociolinguistics |
Aytürk
(2007) |
|
|
11/30 |
Psycholinguistics |
Coltheart
(2006) |
|
|
12/7 |
Child learning |
Nag et
al. (2014) |
|
|
12/14 |
Adult learning |
Gnanadesikan (2021) Rastle et al. (2021) |
|
|
12/21 |
Computers |
Becker
(1988) |
|
|
12/28 |
*Presentations [last class] |
|
|
Readings
Aytürk, İ. (2007). Attempts at romanizing the Hebrew Script and their failure: Nationalism, religion and alphabet reform in the Yishuv. Middle Eastern Studies, 43(4), 625-645.
Becker, J. D. (1988). Unicode 88. Technical report. Xerox Corporation.
Coltheart, M. (2006). Dual route and connectionist models of reading: An overview. London Review of Education, 4(1), 5-17.
Coulmas, F. (2003). Writing systems: An introduction to their linguistic analysis. Cambridge University Press. Chs. 1-2: What is writing? and The basic options: meaning and sound (pp. 1-37).
Dehaene, S., & Cohen, L. (2011). The unique role of the visual word form area in reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(6), 254-262.
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2021). S1: The native script effect. In Y. Haralambous (Ed.), Grapholinguistics in the 21st century 2020: Grapholinguistics and its applications (pp. 103-123). Brest: Fluxus Editions.
Gong, X. (2017). Verb stems in Tangut and their orthography. Scripta, 9, 29-48.
Grushkin, D. A. (2017). Writing signed languages: What for? What form? American Annals of the Deaf, 161(5), 509-527.
Handel, Z. (2019). Sinography: The borrowing and adaptation of the Chinese script. Leiden: Brill. Ch. 8: Beyond the Sinographosphere: Sumerian and Akkadian (pp. 281-308).
Haudricourt, A. G. (2010). The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet. Mon-Khmer Studies, 39, 89-104.
Karoonboonyanan, T. (1999). Standardization and implementations of Thai language. Technical report. National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Bangkok.
Kettunen, H., & Helmke, C. (2005). Introduction to Maya hieroglyphs. Wayeb & Leiden University ms.
McCawley, J. D. (1994). Some graphotactic constraints. In W.C. Watt (Ed.) Writing systems and cognition: Perspectives from psychology, physiology, linguistics, and semiotics (pp. 115-127). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
Meletis, D. (2019). The grapheme as a universal basic unit of writing. Writing Systems Research, 11(1), 26-49.
Nag, S., Snowling, M., Quinlan, P., & Hulme, C. (2014). Child and symbol factors in learning to read a visually complex writing system. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(5), 309-324.
Rastle, K., Lally, C., Davis, M. H., & Taylor, J. S. H. (2021). The dramatic impact of explicit instruction on learning to read in a new writing system. Psychological Science, 32(4), 471-484.
Robinson, A. (2002). Lost languages. New York: McGraw Hill. Ch. 2: The labyrinth of Minos: Linear B. (pp. 74-103).
Salehuddin, K. (2013). Arabic script of written Malay: Innovative transformations towards a less complex reading process. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 21, 63-76.
Sampson, G. (2015). Writing systems (2nd edition). Sheffield: Equinox. Ch. 8: A featural system: Korean Hangul (pp. 143-166).
Schulte, M. (2015). Runology and historical sociolinguistics: On runic writing and its social history in the first millennium. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 1(1), 87-110.
Sebba, M. (2009). Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research. Writing Systems Research, 1(1), 35-49.
Strayer, H. R. (2013). From neumes to notes: The evolution of music notation. Musical Offerings, 4(1), 1.
Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2022). Statistical learning in word reading and spelling across languages and writing systems. Scientific Studies of Reading, 26(2), 139-149.
Zhang, J., Du, J., & Dai, L. (2020). Radical analysis network for learning hierarchies of Chinese characters. Pattern Recognition, 103, 107305.
Zhao, L. (1998). Nüshu: Chinese women’s characters. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 129, 127-137.
Some interesting books about writing systems
Coulmas, F. (2003). Writing systems: An introduction to their linguistic analysis. Cambridge University Press.
Daniels, P. T., & Bright, W. (Eds.). (1996). The world’s writing systems. Oxford University Press.
DeFrancis, J. (1989). Visible speech. University of Hawaii Press.
Handel, Z. (2019). Sinography: The borrowing and adaptation of the Chinese script. Brill.
Konstantinov, V. (2019). Es steht geschrieben: Von der Keilschrift zum Emoji. Gerstenberg. 維達利、鼎玉鉉譯（2020）世界文字圖解簡史。大塊文化出版有限公司。[a big comic book!]
Robinson, A. (2002). Lost languages: The enigma of the world’s undeciphered scripts. New York: McGraw Hill.
Sampson, G. (2015). Writing systems (2nd edition). Sheffield: Equinox.
Sproat, R. (2000). A computational theory of writing systems. Cambridge University Press.
Some interesting links
Babelstone: Dictionaries, fonts, and other stuff relating to writing systems in less familiar (sometimes extinct) languages in/around China
Grapholinguistics conference series (one of many such things)
New language discovered in cuneiform (September, 2023)
Reading and Writing journal
Runes, Nazis, and the modern American right wing
Ted Chiang’s short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” (alternating scifi / realistic stories expressing how writing and other memory aids radically change human relationships)
Translating Akkadian to English with neural machine translation
Written Language & Literacy journal
為配合教育部針對保護智慧財產權觀念之宣導，課程大綱 內容請加註警語「請尊重智慧財產權，不得非法影印教師 指定之教科書籍」。（此項目為教育部「大專校院執行校 園保護智慧財產權行動方案自評表」重要指標，請授課教 師協助配合宣導。）