Language and Orthography Instructor: Tsueifen Chen
Orthography, Script, and Writing System A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.symbolic systemlanguage
What is orthography? Orthography describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used, and the rules about how to write these symbols.graphemesdiacritics Most natural languages developed as oral- aural languages, and writing systems have usually been crafted or adapted afterwards as representations of the spoken language.natural languages
Introduction to English and Chinese English, Italian, Finnish as alphabetic languages Chinese as an morpho-syllabic language Alphabetic languages: Grapheme-phoneme correspondences (letter-sound correspondences)— the relationships between letters and sounds Morpho-syllabic languages: morpheme-syllable
English orthography English as an alphabetic language What is alphabetic language? Phoneme Grapheme Phoneme-grapheme correspondences
Phonemes Phoneme: a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two words. e.g. cat vs. bat /k/ vs. /b/ English has 26 letters, 40 phonemes (25 consonant sounds and 15 vowels) See also
Graphemes Grapheme: a grapheme is a minimal unit in a writing system Graphemes are the letters and letter combinations forming patterns found in words e.g. /i/: e (me), e-e (scheme), ee (greet), ea (seat), ie (thief), y (lady), ey (alley), ei (ceiling)
Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences One-to-one correspondence e.g. One-to-two correspondence (a single phoneme with two graphemes): digraphs e.g. One-to three correspondence (a single phoneme with three graphemes): trigraphs Some exceptions: “box” has 4 phonemes /b/ /a/ /k/ /s/ and 3 graphemes; some say 4 phonemes and 4 graphemes
Exercise Group assignment: (1)find out the 40 phonemes of English, (2) give students some words and ask them to figure out how many phonemes are there in those words.
Chinese orthography Chinese as a morpho-syllabic language What is morpho-syllabic language Morpheme Syllable Character Word
Chinese orthography continues… Definition of morpheme Definition of syllable What is a character? One-character word; two-character word; three-character word
Exercise Ask students to think of some Chinese words that are one-character, two-character, three- character, and four-character.
Learning Chinese and English How many English words are there? How many Chinese words are there? How many English words do we have to know? How many Chinese words do we have to know?
Comparisons between English and Chinese Chinese as a dead language Literacy requirement: knowing 4000 Chinese characters is basic, while in English… Writing difference: the layout is different (spacing, square, etc.) 1.5 Chinese character = 1 English word