--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>

wrote:

>
> > Considering that no orthography has ever deliberately been
> > "non-phonemic," that looks like a pretty good guess.
>
> Some of the Roman alphabet-based 'syllabaries', e.g. that of
> Potawatomi, deliberately drop the phonation contrast! Or are you
> denying these systems the status of 'orthographies'?
>
> Philippine orthographies relegate glottal stops to the

pronunciations

> shown in dictionaries. Malay <e> (two distinct vowels) and final

<k>

> also spring to mind, though <k> may be an example of a language

having

> two co-existing spelling systems - native and loanword.
>
> As to the Royal Thai General System of Transcription,...

This argument about non-phonemicity was given to me in conversation
with a linguist working with Cree who had hoped to introduce
alphabetic literacy in a certain area but was reluctantly in the
process of transfering to syllabics.

Since the Cree had been writing without using diacritics (how am I
supposed to say this, overdot and preaspiration, not diacritic as in
vowel markers) there was a certain amount of underrepresentation.
Also sometimes finals were left off as well. All these symbols were
of a reduced size, had a different status in the system for native
speakers, and the overall shape of the word was left unchanged -
without these symbols, it was called unpointed text.

But when writing in an alphabet, the English linguists used the
double vowel system for long vowels and h for preaspiration. Now the
long vowel and the h have a symbol _of the same status_ as other
symbols and are not as likely to be left out. So, somehow it was
felt that the syllabic system contributed to a habit of
underrepresentation. This was especially so if a writer wrote only
one symbol for each syllable and did not write the final. Also a
reduced vowel might have disappeared altogether in a dialect but the
writer might use a full syllabic symbol for what was perceived by
the linguist to be a consonant(no vowel).

In a language with multisyllabic morphemes there were relatively few
homographs. However, some homogtraphs were found and that was
enough to prove that underrepresentation should not be allowed.

While Kenneth Pike's Phonemics was a strong influence, he later
suggested an 'ethnophonemic' principle, and even underrepresentation
was eventually considered as allowable if non-scientific, a real
compromise. The morphophonemic principle had its own ups and downs.

I am sure someone somewhere commented that syllabaries tend to have
a certain amount of underrepresentation in them (as though alphabets
don't) This is not my argument - just a comment on a view that I
have heard expressed from time to time.

Two questions really

1. Do syllabaries, in fact, tend towards greater underrepresentation
than alphabetic orthographies?

2. To what extent is underrepresentaiton detrimental to literacy?
How much can be tolerated without undermining literacy?

Suzanne