Location: Paraphonological Phenomena

Discussion: Orthographic evidenceReported This is a featured thread

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BridgetDS
BridgetDS
Orthographic evidence
Feb 7 2008, 1:00 PM EST | Post edited: Feb 7 2008, 1:00 PM EST
Here are a couple links to my work on Akkadian that provides a counterpoint to Gnanadesikan's presentation at the conference:
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bdsamuel/pdfs/akkad-handout.pdf
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bdsamuel/pdfs/akkadian.pdf
I also have a copy of Poser's handout that inspired my investigation into Akkadian if anyone is interested, but I don't want to post it here in case it's not ok with him. 2  out of 2 found this valuable. Do you?    
raimy
raimy
1. RE: Orthographic evidence
Feb 8 2008, 9:18 AM EST | Post edited: Feb 8 2008, 9:18 AM EST
Continuing the discussion on what we can learn about syllables from orthography is very important in my mind primarily because I encounter people who try to push the idea that segments are illusory and only come to metalinguistic awareness when a person encounters an alphabetic writing system. I'm very skeptical about this claim and found Amalia's talk very comforting in that it appears to be very difficult to find the 'perfect syllabary' example. Add this to Bridget's Akkadian analysis and apparently Poser's claims and the relationship between syllables, segments and orthography is very complex.

One of my favorite aspects of Amalia's talk was when she suggested that orthographic systems 'sample' some level of phonological representation to base the graphic system on. In my understanding, this means that orthographic systems show 'proof of concept' of different levels of representation and that we don't have very good metalinguistic access to these levels of representation. Our metalinguistc access appears to be good enough to support writing systems but not accurate enough to produce a 'perfect' phonemic/allophonic/syllabic/footic/x level of phonology representation.

YMMV

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ulfsbjorninn
ulfsbjorninn
2. RE: Orthographic evidence
Mar 24 2008, 2:01 PM EDT | Post edited: Mar 24 2008, 2:01 PM EDT
There is a nice paper on syllabaries and evidence for innate linguistic knowledge regards syllabification, funny title, courtesy of Harris and Gussmann: 'Word-Final Codas: why the west was wrong'

It is freely available from his website, scroll down to 1997/8: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/johnh/public.html

best,
shanti

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