Iceve Orthography (original) (raw)

2003

For those working with minority languages, one of the first needs is the ability to work with the orthography of the language on a computer. The prerequisite for this is an adequate description of the orthography. But how does one go about that description? What is needed to form such a description? This paper provides a detailed outline for such a description with practical suggestions for a variety of script families and addressing particular domain specific issues.

Standardised orthography - A shoe for a bare foot

Smallcodes srl (www.smallcodes.com) is a company based in Florence and made by a group of six people who believed that working with minority languages was economically sustainable and even profitable. We were wrong about that. But we also believed, and we still do, that the way to preserve these minority languages was the use of technology. Technology, by definition, is one of the most standardised and homogenizing field. It may sound bizarre that our way to fight cultural assimilation is the use of the most standardising thing in the world, namely technology, but that is what we firmly believe. That is why, together with the Institute of Computational Linguistics of National Research Council, we gained some experience in the use of standardised orthographies for the design of digital tools for minority languages.

One Orthography, Four Lects: The Unified Berawan Orthography

Berawan is an endangered Austronesian language family consisting of four lects, which are Batu Belah, Long Teru, Long Jegan, and Long Terawan. Their settlements are located in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The impetus for a unified orthography came from the Berawan community, who desire to write their lects consistently and reflecting the way they speak. The unified orthography was developed starting with a phonological analysis of the Berawan lects. This was followed by several orthography workshops and discussions with individual Berawan communities, culminating in a combined orthography workshop in which a unified orthography was agreed upon. The aim of the paper is to provide the groundwork for establishing the unifed orthography of the Berawan language family. A phonological comparison of the four Berawan varieties is included for this purpose. The phonological descriptions are taken from Burkhardt (2014). maxim of 'maximal representation of speech 'shallow orthography' approach are employed. On this basis, issues that arise for graphemic representation of Berawan phonemes are then discussed and the decisions made by the participants of the combined workshops are described. The paper also touches on issues encountered throughout the discussion. The issues that arose are primarily related to the differences in orthographic systems between the Berawan lects and the Malay language. The paper ends with a proposed unified Berawan orthography including a comprehensive list of phoneme-grapheme correspondences.

A guide to the developing orthography of Icetod

2015

didi didi 'rain, weather' dob dɔbᵃ 'mud' duɗer dʉɗɛr 'water beetle' zeƙw zɛƙwᵃ 'stay, habitation' zin zɨn 'zebra' zot zɔtᵃ 'chain' zuk zukᵘ 'very' loperen 'ghost' namɛɗɔ 'back of head' loupal 'cobra' narɛʉ 'viper species' Feɓurar Fɛɓʉrarᵓ 'February' Mac Macᵓ 'March' Epiril Epirilᵒ 'April' Mey Meyᵒ 'May' Jun Junᵒ 'June' Julay Julayᵒ 'July' tsol tsol 'bee-eater' tsowir tsowir 'speckled mousebird' tsor tsɔr 'baboon' zin zɨn 'zebra' tufereƙ tʉfɛrɛƙᵃ 'black-jack' xuxub xuxubᵃ 'forest dombeya' tsitsin tsɨtsɨn 'dipping stick' watsʼw watsʼwᵃ 'rock-crevice beehive' tsʼe tsʼɛ 'skin' tsorit tsoritᵃ 'blood vessel' Recent past Recent past intentional 1SG 'I' fútíà nàkᵃ fútésíá nàkᵃ 2SG 'you' fútídà nàkᵃ fútésídà nàkᵃ

Orthography Development for the Standardization of Bhujel: Issues and Approaches

JODEM ( Journal of the Department of English), Vol. 3, pp. 1-8, 2011

This paper attempts to examine the issues and approaches to orthography development for the standardization of Bhujel, a preliterate language. Bhujel, natively referred to as puk'gyal yur. (puk'gyal 'Bhujel' and yur language'), along with Hayu and other Kiranti languages, is one of the east Himalayish languages of Himalayish section of the Bodic branch of Tibeto-Burman language family (Regmi, 2007). Ît is an endangered language spoken by 10,733 (.e. 9.196) of the 1. 17.664 ethnic Bhujel (Gurung et al., 2006) However, this language is actually spoken by an estimated 3,923 of 5418 (i.e.72.4%) ethnic Bhujel, most of them living along the Mahabharata mountain range of Tanahun District of Nepal. Presently, they are also

Language and Linguistic Orthography

Orthography is an undeniably unique human achievement; this work aims to provide a comprehensive overview of this achievement, by clarifying the concept of orthography and acknowledging its significance. Besides that, it demonstrates the broader types of orthographies that will face any foreign language learner-language orthography and linguistic orthography-and highlights the distinction between the two. In addition to discussing relevant work on orthography, it concludes with an evaluation of the two types, highlighting the differences in many aspects that are related to function, development and usage. Such work will enhance our understanding of orthography and surely contribute, not only to linguistic, but also to language research in general.

2022. Types of orthographic standardization: A sociolinguistic approach (Télécom Paris, 08.06.2022)

In grapholinguistics (and linguistics in general), ‘orthography’ remains a contentious term let alone concept. Since English is a self-regulating writing system (cf. BERG/ARONOFF 2017, 2018) not or-thographically regulated by any official authority of linguistic policy, ‘orthography’ has often been used as a descriptive term more or less synonymous to ‘writing system’ in central and highly visible anglophone literature. In contrast, in other grapholinguistic traditions – such as the germanophone –, ‘orthography’ is interpreted prescriptively and tied to notions of normativity and system-external regulation (cf. NEEF 2015, DÜRSCHEID 2016, MELETIS 2020). While descriptive grapholinguistics (and its most prominent subbranch of graphematics) is concerned with what is systematic (or ‘grammatical’), i.e., conforms to the regularities of the system, orthography adds to this the evalua-tive and (meta)¬prag¬ma¬tic¬ally relevant notion of ‘correctness’. However, the existence of orthographic standardization cannot be captured by a simplifying dichotomy, with systems like English classified as unregulated and systems like German as officially regulated; instead, there is a whole variety of different orthographies that serve as a normative benchmark in writing systems, rendering their respective users aware of the (in)correctness of scribal practices. In this paper, such different types of orthography will be described with the help of sever-al criteria that form the basis of a preliminary typology. In systems that are equipped with one, an orthography becomes a structural matter; however, it always originates as a social phenomenon, which is echoed by the predominantly sociolinguistic nature of the following criteria (cf. also CA-HILL 2014, HINTON 2014): — Natural vs. artificial captures whether the orthographic conventions in a writing system have de-veloped naturally, through implicit negotiations among users during the prolonged continued use of the writing system (cf. MIHM 2016 for premodern orthographies), to become a ‘phenomenon of the third kind’ (cf. KELLER 2014), or whether they are artificial in the sense of having either been (1) implemented for an existing and established writing system without consideration of the actual use of that system (whether said system already had an orthographic standardization or not), or (2) im-plemented immediately during/after the creation of a new writing system, which has thus never been in use without a standardization. — Regulated vs. unregulated describes, in a narrow sense, whether an orthographic standardization is officially regulated by an external stakeholder of linguistic policy (such as the Council for German Orthography in the case of German orthography) or not (such as English orthographies; cf. also KARAN 2014). — Codified vs. uncodified reflects whether orthographic conventions are externally and explicitly cod-ified as rules – whether these are officially regulated or not. Types of codifications include rule-books, guidelines, and dictionaries. Notably, orthographies can be unregulated but codified (such as English orthographies, for which there exist dictionaries with – strictly speaking – only nonofficial status). — Original vs. reformed is a subcriterion assessing whether a regulated codified orthography exists in its first, i.e., original form, or whether it has been reformed, i.e., re-codified, at least once. — Community involvement vs. no community involvement (or a continuum of bottom-up vs. top-down standardization): In a loose sense, this criterion pertains to the involvement of users in the (implicit or explicit, gradual or onetime) establishment of orthographic conventions, their codifica-tion as rules, and their potential reform, i.e., bottom-up processes of standardization. In a narrow sense, it describes whether community members are involved in the (initial) explicit regulation and possibly codification of orthographic rules (cf. BOW 2013, PAGE 2013 for case studies) – which is the case mostly in the context of literacy development (cf. LÜPKE 2011, the contributions in CA-HILL/RICE 2014), i.e., the creation of new writing systems from scratch. — As the first of two criteria that are structural in nature, variable vs. nonvariable establishes a con-tinuum capturing the degree of a writing system’s graphematic variability. It thus determines the possibility of (licensed or unlicensed) graphematic variation and with it, the expression of social (non-denotative) meaning and creativity etc. in writing. The Japanese writing system, for example, often affords multiple ways of writing the same word (or, more generally, utterance) without a devi-ance from the norm automatically being perceived as strictly ‘incorrect’ (cf. JOYCE/MASUDA 2019). It is crucial whether these variable parts of a writing system are unregulated, as there may exist graphematically highly variable writing systems which are strictly regulated and thus do not afford the same possibilities for ‘correct’ graphematic variation. — Motivated vs. arbitrary is used to evaluate whether orthographic conventions/rules are based on the graphematics of the writing system, i.e., its internal systematics and its actual usage, in which case they are motivated, or whether they are arbitrary and based on other (external) considerations. It is important to emphasize that this list is, of course, non-exhaustive. However, the proposed crite-ria allow categorizing and comparing different types of orthographic standardization. This can (fi-nally) further our understanding of the status that diverse kinds of norms assume in different writing systems. Notably, linguistic norms arguably play a more prominent role in the written modality than in the spoken one – they possibly even originate in writing and literacy (cf. MÄ¬KIL¬LÄH¬DE/LEP¬PÄ-NEN/IT¬KON¬EN 2019 for normativity in language). In this paper, not only the listed criteria will be presented – along with examples of writing systems and their orthographies to which they apply in various combinations – but a related im-portant question that will be raised is what bearing this typology has on central normative concepts such as ‘orthographic rule’ and ‘orthographic mistake’. Specifically, differences in the perception of prescriptivity will be highlighted – what to members of one literate community may be a rule (and a deviation from it a mistake) may for members of another community merely be a convention (and a ‘deviation’ from it variation). Fleshing out the basis of grapholinguistic normativity is expected to not only improve our understanding of writing and literacy practices, but pragmatics – and meta-pragmatic beliefs – regarding the linguistic and communicative behavior of members of literate communities in general. Furthermore, it is relevant to applied fields such as literacy development and the reform of existing orthographies. References BERG, KRISTIAN & MARK ARONOFF. 2017. Self-organization in the spelling of English suffixes: The emergence of culture out of anarchy. Language 93(1). 37–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2017.0000 BERG, KRISTIAN & MARK ARONOFF. 2018. Further evidence for self-organization in English spelling. Language 94(1). e48–e53. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2018.0013 BOW, CATHERINE. 2013. Community-based orthography development in four Western Zambian languages. Writ-ing Systems Research 5(1). 73–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/17586801.2012.747427 CAHILL, MICHAEL. 2014. Non-linguistic factors in orthographies. In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Develop-ing orthographies for unwritten languages, 9–25. Dallas: SIL International. CAHILL, MICHAEL & KEREN RICE (eds.). 2014. Developing orthographies for unwritten languages. Dallas: SIL In-ternational. DÜRSCHEID, CHRISTA. 2016. Einführung in die Schriftlinguistik, 5th edn. (UTB 3740). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. HINTON, LEANNE. 2014. Orthography wars. In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Developing or¬tho¬graphies for unwritten languages, 139–168. Dallas: SIL International. JOYCE, TERRY & HISASHI MASUDA. 2019. On the notions of orthography and graphematic representation from the perspective of the Japanese writing system. Written Language & Literacy 22(2). 247–279. https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00028.joy KARAN, ELKE. 2014. Standardization: What’s the hurry? In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Developing or-thographies for unwritten languages, 107–138. Dallas: SIL International. KELLER, RUDI. 2014. Sprachwandel: von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache, 4th edn. (UTB, 1567). Tübingen: Francke. LÜPKE, FRIEDERIKE. 2011. Orthography development. In Peter Austoin & Julia Sallabank (eds.), Hand-book of en-dangered languages, 312–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975981.016 MÄKILLÄHDE, ALEKSI, VILLE LEPPÄNEN & ESA ITKONEN. 2019. Norms and normativity in language and linguistics: Basic concepts and contextualization. In Aleksi Mäkillähde, Ville Leppänen & Esa Itkonen (eds.), Norms and normativity in language and linguistics, 1–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.209.01mak MELETIS, DIMITRIOS. 2020. The nature of writing. A theory of grapholinguistics (Grapholinguistics and Its Applica-tions 3). Brest: Fluxus Éditions. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-meletis MIHM, AREND. 2016. Zur Theorie der vormodernen Orthographien: Straßburger Schreibsysteme als Erkenntnis-grundlage. Sprachwissenschaft 41(3–4). 271–309. NEEF, MARTIN. 2015. Writing systems as modular objects: Proposals for theory design in grapholinguistics. Open Linguistics 1. 708–721. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2015-0026 PAGE, CHRISTINA J. 2013. A new orthography in an unfamiliar script: A case study in participatory engagement strategies. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34(5). 459–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2013.783035

ORTHOGRAPHY DESIGN and READING

ORTHOGRAPHY DESIGN and READING, 2022

Orthographies are for reading, of course; and of course, for writing as well, though what is written is intended for reading, at least by the author, at least as he or she writes. The written is something other than a picture or a painting, though both are initially processed visually; and the written is more than a musical score, though both have something to do with sounds 'to-be-performed'. Presumably, then, one's understanding of reading should have, and no doubt already does have, something to do with designing orthographies; and one's understanding of reading is largely a matter of understanding the cognitive processes involved in reading. We are giving ourselves a challenging task: How to "reverse engineer" the design of a new orthography based on what we know about the cognitive processing of reading texts in established orthographies? To advance this project I consider a few of the default understandings that many promote, intentionally or unintentionally, explicitly or implicitly, verifiably or otherwise. These default understandings act (almost) as axioms for some, that is, self-evident truths, that which is taken as given, as already firmly established rules or principles, which perhaps are or should be beyond questioning. I think these common and consequential understandings warrant further scrutiny, which I then pursue.