Language and Orthography Instructor: Tsueifen Chen

Spoken language vs. Written language Spoken language Written language

Spoken language Spoken language is a form of human communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary (usually at least 10,000) together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into syntactically organized sentences and phrases. communicationwordsvocabulary mouthvowelsconsonantssentences phrases

Spoken language continues… Many spoken languages are written. However, even today, there are many world languages that can be spoken but have no standard written form. Such languages can be expressed in writing using thewritten International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).International Phonetic Alphabet

Spoken language continues… Africa, Asia and the Pacific are the regions where there are many small language groups, although there is also a large number of small indigenous groups in Latin America. Most of these small languages are not written. The same is true of some larger groups in Africa and Asia, numbering in a few cases more than one million speakers. (From URL_ID=28301&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)

Spoken language continues … Even from the point of view of syntax, spoken language usually has its own set of grammatical patterns which sometimes may be quite different from that in written language.syntax e.g. I am loving it. (McDonald’s) I don’t see nobody. (I see nobody.) I don’t know nothing about it. (I know nothing about it.)

Written language A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages. languagewriting systeminvention spokengestural A written language exists only as a complement to a specific spoken or gestural language, and no natural language is purely written. However, extinct languages may be in effect purely written when only their writings survive. (explain extinct vs. dead language) natural language extinct languages

Exercise: Differences between Spoken and Written language Group exercise—please discuss with your group members and list some of the differences between spoken and written language. ference-between-written-and-spoken-language/ ference-between-written-and-spoken-language/

Languages of the world ily ily Languages in the world are mainly categorized as alphabetic, syllabic, or logographic-phonetic, according to the relationship between a script and the structure of its language (DeFrancis, 1989).

Languages of the world continue… Alphabetic languages: use letters to represent sounds, not meaning. Syllabic languages: each character represents a syllable. Logographic-phonetic (or morpho-syllabic): each character represents a morpheme or semantic unit. ( From )

What is alphabet? An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language. letters graphemesphonemespoken language An alphabets are a phonemic system. Although this is commonly defined as a system that represent 'sounds', it really involve more abstract symbols that denote phonemes.

Alphabetic language continues… For instance, t, usually represents the phoneme /t/ in English, and d usually represents the phoneme /d/. The word tip has 3 phonemes /t/ /ı/ /p/.

‘What is alphabet’ continues… There are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most common being Latin, deriving from the first true alphabet, Greek.Latin The Roman alphabet is the alphabet used for many modern-day languages. It came from the Greek alphabet. The earliest alphabet was in Egypt. It was first used to write Latin. Many languages are written with it today. It is also called the Latin alphabet.alphabetlanguages Greek alphabetearliest alphabetLatin

Alphabetic language continues… A purely phonemic system would encode phonological information fairly faithfully, rather than maintaining the structure or combinations of symbols to convey information or relationships involving word meanings. Systems that do just that are morphophonemic. The English alphabet is a morphophonemic system, in that though its letters (or graphemes) basically represent phonemes, these often do not change even when pronunciation differs in meaningfully related words. English alphabetlettersgraphemes From

Examples of Alphabetic language English The modern English alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 26 letters. Of the 26 letters, 5 letters, a, e, i, o, u, represent vowels, and 21 letters represent consonants.

Examples of Alphabetic language Finnish alphabet The Finnish alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, and especially its Swedish extension. Officially it comprises 28 letters:FinnishLatin alphabetSwedish AA, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, X, Y, Z, Å, Ä, ÖBCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUV XYZÅÄÖ

Examples of alphabetic language continues… Russian alphabet The modern Russian alphabet (русский алфавит) is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet and contains 33 letters.Cyrillic alphabet

Syllabic language What is syllabic language? Ans. A writing system whose characters represent syllables is syllabic language. A syllable consists of a vowel and at least one consonant, though various combinations are possible, including single vowels.vowel consonant

Examples of syllabic language The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts: Chinese characters called kanji ( 漢字 ), and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana ( ひらがな or 平仮名 ) and katakana ( カタカナ or 片仮名 ).Chinese characterskanjisyllabicChinese charactershiragana katakana

Example of syllabic language continues… The Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana (developed around AD 700). They are mainly used to write some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words, e.g. hotel is written with three kana, ホテル (ho-te-ru), in Japanese. Because Japanese uses many CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language.Japanese languagekanahiragana katakana

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Morpho-syllabic language What is a logographic language? What is morpho-syllabic language? Ans. A writing system whose symbols represent morphemes or semantic units is logographic language.

Morpho-syllabic language continues… A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language).graphemewordmorpheme Most Chinese characters represent both a syllable and a morpheme, and thus the characters used to write languages such as Mandarin can be described as morphosyllabic. Mandarin

Morpho-syllabic language continues…