Table Of ContentDimitrios Meletis, Christa Dürscheid
Writing Systems and Their Use
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs
Editors
Chiara Gianollo
Daniël Van Olmen
Editorial Board
Walter Bisang
Tine Breban
Volker Gast
Hans Henrich Hock
Karen Lahousse
Natalia Levshina
Caterina Mauri
Heiko Narrog
Salvador Pons
Niina Ning Zhang
Amir Zeldes
Editor responsible for this volume
Chiara Gianollo
Volume 369
Dimitrios Meletis, Christa Dürscheid
Writing Systems
and Their Use
An Overview of Grapholinguistics
Publiziert mit Unterstützung des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds zur Förderung der
wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Despite careful production of our books, sometimes mistakes happen. We regret that the
original version of Chapter 6 ‘Writing system typology’ is in need of correction. Please note that
changes were introduced on pages 226 and 229.
ISBN 978-3-11-075777-4
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075783-5
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075789-7
ISSN 1861-4302
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110757835
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International License. For details go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931908
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2022 Dimitrios Meletis, Christa Dürscheid, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
The book is published open access at www.degruyter.com.
Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Preface
We begin our preface in an unusual way, as each of us writes a few words sep-
arately. Doing this is motivated by the genesis of the present book, which also
explains why Christa Dürscheid commences with her notes (although she is
the second author) followed by remarks from Dimitrios Meletis (who is the first
author).
“There is [. . .] no linguistic work that synoptically presents writing-related
aspects of the language system. This is the gap that this textbook aims to fill.”
This quote – translated into English – stems from my book on grapholinguistics
(Einführung in die Schriftlinguistik, in short referred to as Schriftlinguistik), which
appeared in its first edition 20 years ago now. In fact, these two sentences open
its preface. I place them also at the beginning of this preface for the following
reason: Although my introductory book was frequently used in teaching and also
widely received by the research community, the response was mostly limited to
the German-speaking world. My wish was to change this, to make Schriftlinguistik
(both the discipline and the book) known beyond the German-language area –
which has now been achieved by the publication of the present book. However,
it would be wrong to assume that this monograph is merely an adaptation of the
German-language introduction (even if this had been the original intention);
rather, Dimitrios and I have reviewed and re-handled the broad field of grapholin-
guistics. Thus, our book does not centre on German, as Schriftlinguistik did; also,
it is not a textbook but a work that presents its own theoretical approaches and
is addressed to peers. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the 2002 book on grapho-
linguistics is the model for this monograph, and select parts of it have found their
way into two of the following chapters. It will become evident, however, that the
present book goes far beyond that – which is mainly thanks to the co-authorship
with Dimitrios Meletis. With that, I pass the word on to him.
The subject of writing had already fascinated me before, but it was during my
studies when I picked up Christa Dürscheid’s Einführung in die Schriftlinguistik
that I discovered an entire field devoted to it. This field would soon become my
primary topic of interest – and research. Most captivating for me were aspects
that turned out to be research gaps pointing to relevant desiderata. For example,
since an important facet of my interest in writing concerns typography, one of my
first own academic ventures led to the question of how the visual appearance of
writing had been treated in linguistic research. A later and much bigger project
was motivated by my background in general linguistics and my focus on com-
parative and typological perspectives. It centres around a question that is easily
posed but highly complex: What do the world’s writing systems have in common?
In the course of addressing this question, I attended international conferences on
Open Access. © 2022 Dimitrios Meletis, Christa Dürscheid, published by De Gruyter. This work
is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110757835-202
VI Preface
writing and had the privilege to meet many scholars working in different disci-
plines and on diverse writing systems. When I presented my own research there –
which is infused with ideas from German grapholinguistics but, as mentioned,
applies this foundation to broader questions – I also observed that there was an
interest in this rich tradition of studying writing that was, alas, linguistically inac-
cessible to many. Furthermore, I felt there was a need for a more unified frame-
work and vocabulary that facilitates research and exchange and became deter-
mined to contribute to this goal. Meanwhile, at an important point in my career, I
approached Christa and gained her as a mentor. This has shaped my research in
many ways. Among the things we have in common are hopes and visions for the
field of grapholinguistics, which eventually translated into the idea of reworking
Christa’s book together. However, our plans for an adaptation gradually turned
into something new, resulting in a book that benefited from the coalescence of
our two different perspectives (and generations). Schriftlinguistik enlightened
me – I hope this new work will do the same for our readership.
At last, we both want to thank Cristina Stanley and Florian Koller for their
help with the book’s comprehensive bibliography. We also wish to express our
gratitude to the University of Zurich, where we found the working conditions
needed to write a book such as this. Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to
the Swiss National Science Foundation, which generously supported the publica-
tion. And with that, there’s only one thing left to say: that we wish the book the
resonance that grapholinguistics deserves.
Zurich, January 2022
Dimitrios Meletis and Christa Dürscheid
Contents
Preface V
1 Introduction 1
1.1 The emergence of grapholinguistics 2
1.2 Views on writing in the history of linguistics 5
1.3 Overview of this book 11
2 Language, speech, and writing 14
2.1 Speech and writing as modalities of language 14
2.2 Differences between speech/speaking and writing 18
2.3 Dependence vs. autonomy 25
2.3.1 Dependence hypothesis 26
2.3.2 Autonomy hypothesis 28
2.4 Linguistic resources in spoken and written communication 31
2.4.1 Interaction between modality and linguistic resources 31
2.4.2 Koch and Oesterreicher’s model 33
2.4.3 Alternative approaches and open questions 38
2.5 Perspectives from anthropology 42
2.5.1 Autonomous conception of literacy and ‘Great Divide’
theories 43
2.5.2 Ideological conception of literacy 52
3 Graphetics 56
3.1 Foundations of graphetics 56
3.1.1 Definition and scope 56
3.1.2 Types of methods in graphetics 60
3.1.3 Subdisciplines of graphetics 61
3.2 Descriptive graphetics 63
3.2.1 Graphetic units 63
3.2.2 Spatial organisation of the writing surface 66
3.2.3 Segmentation of basic shapes 69
3.3 Materialisation(s) of writing 74
3.3.1 The study of abstract vs. concrete materiality 74
3.3.2 Handwriting and typography 76
3.3.2.1 The study of handwriting and its use 77
3.3.2.2 Current discourses on handwriting 79
3.3.2.3 Handwriting and cognition 84
3.3.2.4 Handwriting and identity 88
VIII Contents
3.3.2.5 Typography: Definition, description, and functions 90
3.3.2.6 The sociosemiotic potentials of handwriting
and typography 94
3.3.2.7 Typographic variation and meaning: three examples 98
3.3.2.8 Typography, readability, and legibility 102
3.3.2.9 Multicultural and intercultural typography 107
3.4 Perspectives from emergent literacy 109
4 Graphematics 115
4.1 Definition 115
4.2 Grapheme 119
4.2.1 Referential vs. analogical conception 120
4.2.2 Suprasegmental conception 123
4.2.3 Criteria for a cross-linguistic grapheme definition 126
4.3 Larger graphematic units 133
4.3.1 Syllables 133
4.3.2 Words 138
4.4 Punctuation 141
4.5 Graphotactics 148
4.6 Written variation and allography 150
4.6.1 Definitions of variation and allography 150
4.6.2 Graphetic variation and allography 153
4.6.3 Graphematic variation and allography 155
4.6.4 Orthographic variation 158
4.7 Perspectives on reading processes 160
4.7.1 Models of word recognition 160
4.7.2 Psychological correlates of grapholinguistic units
and concepts 165
5 Orthography 171
5.1 Definition and types of orthography 171
5.2 Features of orthographies 176
5.3 Types of orthographic rules 183
5.4 Orthographic regulation in different writing systems 188
5.5 Perspectives from sociolinguistics 191
5.5.1 Systems, practices, and ideologies 191
5.5.2 The sociolinguistics of writing 193
5.5.3 Orthography as social action 195
5.5.3.1 Choice of orthographies and scripts 195
Contents IX
5.5.3.2 Literacy development 198
5.5.3.3 Deviance as social action 200
5.5.3.4 Orthography reforms and their metadiscourses 205
6 Writing system typology 210
6.1 Purposes and challenges of typologies 211
6.2 Phonography 218
6.2.1 The phonography/morphography dichotomy:
open questions 218
6.2.2 Tone 220
6.2.3 Segmentaries 221
6.2.3.1 A more fine-grained typology of segmental phonography 221
6.2.3.2 Alphabets 224
6.2.3.3 Abjads 229
6.2.3.4 Abugidas 231
6.2.4 Syllabaries 236
6.3 Morphography 243
6.4 Universals of writing 249
6.5 Perspectives on the history of writing 259
7 Conclusion and outlook 270
References 277
Subject index 307
Name index 315
