What language learners should know about orthography

What is writing to philosophers of languages and linguists?

Writing is viewed as secondary in mainstream linguistics. Humans have always used sounds and gestures as a way to communicate complex emotions or information. By contrast, writing is a technology.

Socrates considered speech to be a superior moral act than writing. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau the advent of writing represented a move away from freedom and nature. Most structuralists and linguists of today believe that written words are “not languages” at all. Ferdinand de Saussure said:

The written and spoken form of a language are two distinct systems of sign. It is only to be able to express the first that the written form exists. In linguistics, the object of study is not the combination of written and spoken words. “The spoken word is the only object that can be studied in linguistics.”

The goal for a learner of languages is to have the ability to comprehend a foreign language, in whatever form it may be presented, whether “real” or “representational”. Of course, speaking is more social than writing or reading, but a person who is illiterate would find it difficult to integrate fully into a society that is predominantly literate.

Writing, but more importantly reading are two powerful tools to accelerate learning.

The history of the written word

Before humans were able to decode and encode all possible acts of speech, they had communicated using visible marks. These stages are sometimes called “full-writing” or “protowriting.”

This distinction may be muddled. It is still a long way off before a writing system can encompass the full range of speech expression. The reader is expected to be able to accurately reproduce the words of a hypothetical act in order to match what was intended by the author.

The evolution of “proto” into “full”, while bringing the similarity of intention to reproduction up to a new level, does not represent a complete system. It is more likely to give priority to certain elements of communication, and cause spoken language in general to change. The words, once merely organizational units of sounds, now take precedence over the actual sounds.

Audio recording, if a system of writing becomes more complete as it is able to capture speech in its various forms, would be the most comprehensive writing system to date. Writing may not have been invented 20,000 years before with the cave drawings and engravings.

In the second definition, all objects d’art are included as written work, even if they have nothing to do with language. It is absurd to include audio recordings in the definition of writing. We return to our original “full-writing” systems, which are “at their peak” of association with spoken languages, rather than “complete.”

According to the prevailing opinion, four distinct human cultures independently developed “full-writing”. The Sumerian culture, which was based on what we now call Iraq, Ancient Egypt, Shang-Dynasty China, about a thousand years later, and civilizations in Mexico and Guatemala today, between 900 BC and 600 BC, were all involved. These developments were spread quickly and led to neighboring cultures developing their own writing system.

In general, writing systems have evolved through stages. They go from being more ideographic than phonographic. There are some differences even between contemporary writing systems. Chinese is an example of a hybrid writing system which retains the concept associations associated with each character in its older forms. In many Asian and East African dialects, vowels can be absent or optional. They may also be written with diacritics.

The classification of major writing systems around the world

All literate English speakers are familiar with the alphabet. Most alphabets trace their roots to Phoenician. This evolved from Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and was widely spread during the Iron Age as Phoenicia grew to be the most powerful commercial force in the Mediterranean.

The Latin alphabet is the one most commonly used around the globe. In addition to their widespread use in Europe, the Americas and many African languages, Southeast Asian and Turkic, they are also used by other language groups.

Many characters are shared by the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets (used today only to write Greek). Some of these share similarities with Latin. Both the Armenian and Georgian scripts have their own set of characters but are believed to be heavily influenced by Greek.

Latin-based languages with the most widespread writing systems:

The Language of the Speaker	Distinctive Characteristics
English	Standard 26-letter alphabet with minimum diacritics
Spanish	The spelling is phonemic, with 27 letters, including the n. Also, there’s an acute accent for stressed syllables.
French	The 26-letter standard system has five diacritics, and two ligatures. The K and W letters are relatively new and rare.
Portuguese	The standard 26-letter alphabet with 5 diacritics. Recent additions K, W and Z are uncommon.
Indonesian	Standard 26-letter alphabet with high phonemic standard and no diacritics. The same language is written in a modified Arabic script.
German	The pseudo-phonemic alphabet consists of 30 letters, including Ss and A.
Turkish	The letters Q, W, X, C, G and O are all missing. C, G and O are also added. Always-dotless-I is differentiated from always-dotted-I to create a total number of 29 phonetic-spelled letters.
Vietnamese	Officially, F, J and W are not included. However, they are often used in loanwords or names. Additional letters include A, E O O U D and A. The tone is indicated by five additional diacritics (A,A,A,A,A,A) that can be added to the circumflexes or breves of the standard letters. The system is a phonetic representation of tonal languages.
Tagalog	Ng and N are officially added to the standard alphabet, making a total 28. Since 1987, C, F and J have been added to the standard system. Another spelling reform in 2013 was done to improve phonemics.
Swahili	Ch replaces C in many loanwords, and even some names. Ng’ and Sh can be added as extra letters. Sometimes Dh, Gh and Ng are also included. The Latin alphabet is often used with a variant of Arabic writing.
Javanese	The standard system is expanded to 32 letters by adding Dh, E and Ny. F, Q, X, and Z, however, are usually only used in loanwords. It is often also written in Arabic and traditional Javanese.
Italian	The spelling is based on the 21 official alphabetic letters. J, K W, X, and Y are only used for loanwords. Also used are grave, circumflex and acute diacritics.
Polish	A, C. E. L. N. O. S. Z. and Z. make up an almost phonemic system of 35 letters. The only place Q, V, and X appear is in loanwords.

Cyrillic is the most commonly used writing system in languages other than English:

The Language of the Speaker	Distinctive Characteristics
Russian	There are 33 letters, including Io and E. These do not exist in Old Slavonic nor Bulgarian.
Ukrainian	Ukrainian uses an apostrophe instead of a “in Russian. The Old Slavonic letter Y, the Russian Io and E are also not included.
Serbian	The 30-letter Cyrillic alphabet is equally used alongside the Latin system that Croatia shares. It is similar to Bulgarian Dzh, although Dj does not appear in Old Slavonic. The alphabet also contains the letters Dzh and Lj which were the origin of other alphabets. It also has the Latin letter J.
Uzbek	It shares Io and E with Russian, but excludes Ts, Shch and’which are present in the majority of Cyrillic alphabets. The Uzbek alphabet shares Io, E and Ts with Russian but does not include Ts, Shch or ‘, which is present in most Cyrillic scripts.

The alphabets are not the same as abjads, syllabaries, or abugidas. They are not all phonographic, but they do represent some sounds.

It is important to note that some alphabets are not consistent in the way they express sound. English, for example, has a very inconsistent representation of sounds. The syllable-based or consonant based systems can be more Phonemic than most alphabets.

Japanese has two writing systems: the Kana and its logographic Kanji system.

Each basic character in abugida is a vowel with a “implicit”, which can be changed with diacritics. These systems are used to write the majority of Brahmic and Ethiopic languages, as well as many Canadian Aboriginal language.

Arabic and Hebrew abjads are still used today. Basic characters in these systems represent only consonants. The diacritical marks or grouping of consonants can indicate the presence of vowels.

Modern Chinese is written in a hybrid system ” Logosyllabic“. Some characters are used to represent phonological information, while others have purely logographic content. All ancient logographic system probably needed to be logosyllabic to meet the needs of an expanding society. However, the majority have disappeared or completely lost their logographic contents by modern times.

Some scholars believe that the modern Korean alphabet is different from because the phonetic specificity is greater than the shallowest of orthographies. The symbols represent phonological features, such as the shape of the mouth or position of tongue, that are combined to create letters, and finally clustered into syllables.

How can I speak another language if I don’t know how to read and write?

How we acquire languages in childhood is very different to how we pick up additional languages later on. Reading and writing play a very small role in developing basic language skills.

As adults, however, we do not have the same access to many of those neurological mechanisms that allowed us to rapidly and naturally develop language as we did as children. We must instead supplement these natural processes by using more deliberate and rational methods.

The idea behind many strategies to teach and learn second languages is that they should recreate childhood conditions as closely as possible. As the adult patterns of life are so different from childhood’s, it is more likely that a large part of acquiring a second language will be through reading rather than listening.

Adults filter out information in a language they cannot understand. A strong vocabulary foundation is essential for a deep immersion in social situations. When it comes to memorizing, visuals and concepts are very helpful.

Learning a new language with a writing system that is drastically different than your own can be incredibly difficult. It may make sense in some situations to practice or read vocabulary by using transliterated texts. This method has some drawbacks, however. It will limit the number of natural situations in which the language can be encountered.

It is possible to learn a new language without any text, but the process will take much longer and may be difficult.

Lingvist allows you to supercharge your vocabulary by practicing it in 30 minute sessions per day. You will be able to practice the words you need in sentences that are similar in structure and content.