User:Robbiemuffin/L2 Presentation Patterns/Sounds and Writing

 Sounds and Writing 

Introduction
Given that there are nearly 7,000 languages in the world today, there are surprisingly few writing systems:  '' * each of the writing systems in the above represent a family of writing systems (and perhaps each color is a type or a prototypical family for a type) used by one or more languages. Each language may add or exclude characters, diacritics, prescriptive use and may change the sounds: additionally within many languages there are regional accents that change the actual sounds represented and their prescriptive use. ''

And of those few, all of them fit into six types: The three main types, logographic, syllabic, and segmental (e.g., an alphabet); along with the three in between types, abugidas, abjads, and featural.

The difference between a syllabic and a segmental system is that the syllabic system demarks entire syllables. The main thing to notice is how syllabic and segmental are so similar. They break words up into their basic constituent sounds (segmental systems are more of an abstraction of the concept).

Indistinctly Alphabetic and Syllabic
Hangul (Korean) uses a writing system that perhaps appears logographic, but is actually approximate to an syllabary: many Jamo (strokes) for each feature of a sound are combined into a syllablic character using a set prescription. About half of the Jamo are direct equivalents of latin alphabet letters, with the others representing consonant sounds, consonant sounds with vowels, dipthongs, and consonant sounds with dipthongs. The result is a system that gives all the information of an alphabet, abstracting to the level of phonetic features, but whose prescriptive use imparts further information:

Approximately Syllabic or Segmental
Chinese is an isolating, analytic language, such that there are many effectively modifying lexemes and the lemma of many words are bare in sentences. For that matter, Chinese and all other living logogramatic languages have only one syllable per character, while most modern chinese words are of course polysyllabic.

Of the segmentals, there are systems that demark only consonants because the vowel sound can be inferred or is allowed to vary. The Latin alphabet comes from an older abjad, the name for this type of system. An abugida necessarily adds the vowels.

At a glance
For living languages, this makes exchanging between the writing systems relatively easy, because one is always fundamentally familiar with the model of abstraction.

Despite this (which some learners might think of as a veritable holy grail of a mapping, because of the simplicity it implies), most languages only partially support this analogy. According to the phonemic orthography wikipedia entry:

Languages with a good grapheme-to-phoneme [sic] correspondence include Bulgarian, Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Macedonian, Mongolian in Cyrillic, Korean, Romanian, Sanskrit, Turkish, Croatian, Serbian and Spanish. Most constructed languages such as Esperanto and Lojban have phonemic orthographies.

Other languages generally map one or more sounds to one or more glyphs or sequences of glyphs, and even the natural languages above usually do not approach true one-to-one correspondence, having a healthy selection of contextual differences. What they do offer, however, is the ability to know, at a glance, what are the phonemes of the written word.

One can think of this presentational model as: Essentially correct (some exclusions apply). Those exclusions are almost always more complex than the writing system; the sounds of the language module will delve into the exclusions.

The Pattern
We're going to present two tables for the raw data for our writing system. One table to show the alphabet or syllabary (for large syllabaries, a selection of glyphs required for procifiency, likely on the order of 1,000) in the majescule and miniscule, and on a second table a much smaller list of the "essential" characters. We will map from the essentials to the others on the basis of whatever similarity presents itself. When presenting this information, the large table is the reference, and the small table is the associative, teaching tool.

Writing System Module
 * transcluded from the Writing System Module: visit it on that page for the recap section of the module.

Sounds of the language
Whereas Japanese may be the most complicated writing system (when taken as a whole), English itself may be the least regular in terms of mapping its sounds to its words. Differences in dialect, differences accounted for by the huge surplus of its users as a lingua franca, as well as a profound set of rules and long lists of exceptions, push English to the verge of offering no phonetic clues at all in the morphology of its written language. In some places such as Guyana and the Caribbean, the meter of spoken language becomes consonant-vowel dominated and loses quite a bit of stress-timing (features wholly foreign to English but in keeping with Spanish and many african cultures), and in general English adopts itself in predictable ways to it's regional, cultural context. However, English only stands out as an extreme example of these features, and generally all languages have wide variation in pronunciation both diachronically and synchronically from dialect to dialect.

IPA Chart
 Vowels See also: IPA, Consonants

Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel.



Recap
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