Graphemics and the History of Phonology
It has often been said that the invention of the alphabet marked the beginning of phonology, in a prescientific sense of the word of course. On the other hand, it has also been said (F. Balk-Smit Duyzentkunst 1978) that "the phoneme concept would never have been developed without the alphabetic script". Apart, however from this ‘chicken-or-egg’ problem the assumption of Mrs. Balk is in itself a sign that something has been changing in linguistics the last decade or two. Writing has come into the picture again. Linguistic structuralism was based exclusively on spoken language, but, thanks to the work of such scholars as H. J. Uldall, J. Vachek and W. Haas, the insight has grown that writing is worth studying also linguistically. If this is so, the following question arises: What remains of the above mentioned relation between phoneme and alphabet (or vice versa) if T.G.G. is right in saying that a phonological level corresponding to a psycholinguistic reality does not exist (Chomsky & Halle 1968)? Mrs. Balk has proved in her article that, in any case the notion ‘phoneme’ does exist and that certain specifications and elaborations of this concept contain alphabetic alements, though most orthographies are morphono-logical and not merely phonological. The history and science of writing (I J. Gelb’s ‘grammatology’) also teach us that not only the alphabetic but also the syllabographic scripts were from the beginning already of a morphonological kind. Especially such grammatologists and semitists as Gelb and E. Reiner have drawn attention to the use of what they call ‘morphographemics’ (= morpho-phonemic spellings) in the ancient Akkadian writing system. And G. M. Schramm, J. C. L. Gibson, S. Morag and others did the same with regard to Classical Hebrew. So, perhaps, we are safe in concluding that there is some unconscious operation of a morphophoneme concept in the human mind.
References
Abercrombie, David
1971 Studies in Phonetics & Linguistics. 3rd ed. London: Oxford Univ. Press.
Austin, William M.
ed. 1967 Papers in Linguistics in Honor of Léon Dostert. The Hague: Mouton.
Balk-Smit Duyzentkunst, Frida
1978 “
Phoneme and Alphabet”.
Zonneveld 1978.1–6.
Chomsky, Noam, & Morris Halle
1968 The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
Cohen, David
ed. 1970 Mélanges Marcel Cohen. The Hague: Mouton.
Gelb, I(gnace) J(ay)
1955 “
Notes on Von Soden’s Grammar of Akkadian”.
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Gelb, I(gnace) J(ay)
1961 “
WA = aw, iw, uw in Cuneiform Writing”.
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Gelb, I(gnace) J(ay)
1963 A Study of Writing: The foundations of grammatology. 2nd ed. Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Gelb, I(gnace) J(ay)
1970 “
A Note on Morphographemics”.
Cohen 1970.73–77.
Gelb, I(gnace) J(ay)
1975 “
Records, Writing, and Decipherment”. Paper 1975.61–86.
Gibson, Johan C. L.
1974 “
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Haas, W(illiam)
1970 Phono-Graphic Translation. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press.
Haas, W(illiam)
ed. 1976 Writing without Letters. Ibid.
Malmberg, Bertil
1970 Språket och människan: Tankar om språk och språk-forskning. 5th ed. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Aldus/Bonniers.
Morag, Shelomo
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On the Historical Validity of the Vocalization of the Hebrew Bible”.
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Reiner, Erica
1966 Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian. The Hague: Mouton.
Reiner, Erica
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How Do We Read Cuneiform Texts?”.
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Reiner, Erica
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Saussure, Ferdinand de
1931 Cours de linguistique générale. 3rd rev. ed. Paris: Payot.
Schramm, Gene M.
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Speech and Writing”.
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Vachek, Josef
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Some Remarks on Writing and Phonetic Transcription”.
Ibid 51.86–93.
Vachek, Josef
1973a Written Language: General problems and problems of English. The Hague: Mouton.
Vachek, Josef
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Venezky, Richard L.
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Brown 1976.69–91.
Wardhaugh, Ronald & H. Douglas Brown
eds. 1976 A Survey of Applied Linguistics. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
Weir, Ruth
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Some Thoughts on Spelling”.
Austin 1967.169–77.
Wilkins, D(avid) A.
1973 Linguistics in Language Teaching. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold.
Zonneveld, Wim
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Cited by 1 other publications
Spiro, Aristotel
2023.
Për një riformulim të parimeve të drejtshkrimit.
Studime Filologjike :3-4
► pp. 103 ff.
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