<table><caption>TABLE 3. Selection of semantically motivated phonograms in Old Japanese</caption><thead><tr><th>Graph</th><th>Middle Chinese</th><th>Old Japanese</th><th>Attestations</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>反</td><td><i>puan</i>'to return'</td><td>/pye/ in 可反流 etc.<br>for <i>kapyer.u</i>'to return'</td><td>XV/3706, 3747, etc.</td></tr><tr><td>草</td><td><i>b̂aw</i>'grass'</td><td>/sa/ in 久草<br>for <i>kusa</i>'grass'</td><td>XIV/3530</td></tr><tr><td>地</td><td><i>dîb</i>'earth'</td><td>/ti/ in 都地<br>for <i>tuti</i>'earth'</td><td>V/812</td></tr><tr><td>馬</td><td><i>mai</i>'/mei:' horse'</td><td>/ma/ in 宇馬<br>for <i>uma</i>'horse'</td><td>XIV/3537, 3538</td></tr><tr><td>梅</td><td><i>məj</i>'plum'</td><td>/me/ in 宇梅<br>for <i>ume</i>'plum'</td><td>V/843, 849, etc.</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>TABLE 4. Toponym spellings involving ameliorative connotations</caption><thead><tr><th>Toponym</th><th>Spelling</th><th>Middle Chinese</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Nara</td><td>寧樂</td><td><i>neŋŋ</i>'tranquil,' <i>lak</i>'joyful'</td></tr><tr><td>Kuni</td><td>恭仁</td><td><i>kuawŋ</i>'reverence,' <i>jin</i>'benevolence'</td></tr><tr><td>Yamato</td><td>養徳</td><td><i>jian</i>'to nurture,' <i>tək</i>'virtue'</td></tr></tbody></table>

capturing allusions actually intended by the choice of phonograms and randomly reading allusions into spellings conceived as purely phonographic renderings void of a second layer of meaning.

As already mentioned, semantic connotations deriving from the morphographic use of characters are especially common when it comes to the spellings of proper nouns. This trend has a long history and can already be observed in what might be termed 'imperial toponyms' in 8th century Japan: Nara (710-740, 745-784) and Kuni (740-744) are the names of two capital cities, whereas Yamato is the name of the central province comprising the former of these capitals, and after which the early state in its entirety was also named. As Table 4 shows, such place names were sometimes written in an auspicious manner, valuing ameliorative connotations over ideal phonetic matches.

If we interpret the graphs in these spellings as morphograms, they would write words along the lines of 'tranquil and joyful,' 'reverence and benevolence,' and 'nurturing virtue.' It is important to note, however, that this is *not* what these names actually mean, and that no such morphemes as *na* 'tranquil' etc. exist in Japanese. The graphs are therefore clearly not morphograms, but phonograms—even if we are dealing with rough approximations of the intended pronunciations at best, as a comparison with the Middle Chinese sound values once again shows. The
result is thus a deliberate compromise between ameliorative connotations on the one hand and imperfect but tolerable phonetic matches on the other. It is typical of such cases that most of the phonograms involved are of an *ad hoc* nature, and thus unproductive in other contexts: 寧 /na/, 恭 /ku/ and 養 /ya(ma)/, for instance, are not attested outside the toponyms quoted above.

The field of toponyms is also of interest in so far as it is here that we find the earliest reflection of an acute awareness of ameliorative and other connotations in both toponyms as such and their spellings. Thus, the notion of *kōji* 好字 ‘pleasant characters’ and *kamei* 嘉名 ‘auspicious names’ is already met with in 8th and 10th century sources respectively (cf. Osterkamp, 2008 for details).

Situated time-wise in between the 8th century and today are transcriptions from the context of the early Christian missionary activities in 16th and early 17th century Japan. Consider the following transcriptions of the name of Jesus Christ as used by Jesuit missionaries (Table 5). *Jezusu* (< Portuguese *Jesus*) is written in a way implying ‘lord of the world, master,’ and *Jezu Kirishito* (< Jesu C(h)risto) likewise in a way implying as it were ‘lord of the world, teacher of noble reason, who brings us across (or rescues us).’

<table><caption>TABLE 5. Japanese transcriptions of the name of Jesus Christ, ca. 1600</caption><thead><tr><td>Name</td><td>Spelling</td><td>Connotations</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Jezusu</td><td>世主子<sup>33</sup></td><td>'world, lord, master'</td></tr><tr><td>Jezu Kirishito</td><td>世主貴理師渡<sup>34</sup></td><td>'world, lord, noble, reason, teacher, bring across'</td></tr></tbody></table>

In China, Jesuit missionaries came up with a different solution, but one that equally involves certain connotations: The transcription *Yēsū* 耶穌 yields ‘father’ and ‘to resurrect’ under a morphographic interpretation (cf. Kojima, 1993). Whether in China or Japan, the choice of phonograms in such cases is clearly everything but coincidental.

<footnote n="33">33. See, e.g., the 1585 letter (in Japanese with Italian translation) signed by the four ambassadors making up the so-called Tenshō embassy (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Borg.cin.536, line 1), or also the title page of some copies of Alessandro Valignano’s *Catechismus Christianæ fidei* (Lisbon 1586), printed slightly later in the same context. At least the copies at the Liceu Passos Manuel, Lisbon, and at the Universidad de Salamanca (call no. BG/26698) carry the names of Jesus and Maria on their title page, written as 世主子 and 滿理阿 respectively.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34. Seen, e.g., in Vigenère (1586/1587: CCCXXXVI; part of the additional pages that are present only in a small number of copies, e.g., Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES M-V-348), and again in Duret (1613; 1619, p. 921). Note also 讚多麻理阿 as a transcription of Sancta Maria on the same page.</footnote>
So far, we have only addressed cases involving neutral or positive semantics. However, the choice of phonograms may also be motivated by pejorative or otherwise negative semantics. The various transcriptions of the word *kirishitan* (< Portuguese *C(h)ristão*) as a designation of the early Catholic Christians in Japan are illustrative of the possible range of allusions (Table 6).

<table><caption>TABLE 6. Transcriptions of the word *kirishitan*, ca. 1600 and beyond</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Spelling(s)</th><th>Connotations</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Fairly neutral</td><td>吉利支丹</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Negative</td><td>鬼利支端, 鬼利志端, 鬼利死炭<sup>35</sup></td><td>'demon' (鬼), 'death' (死)</td></tr><tr><td>Positive</td><td>貴理師端, 貴理志端, 貴理志丹<sup>36</sup></td><td>'noble' (貴), 'reason' (理), 'teacher' (師)</td></tr></tbody></table>

First, there are spellings that qualify as fairly neutral. The first one given here is what can still be found in modern dictionaries, it is also found in the titles of scholarly publications, and so on. In order to show one's disdain for Christianity, for instance after the expulsion of Christian missionaries from the country in the early 17th century, there was a plethora of other ways of transcribing the same word. Some of the attested variants involve phonograms implying—as in the examples quoted above—'demon' or 'death' to write /ki/ and /si/ (*shi*). Christian missionaries or converts on the other hand opted for totally different spellings with positive connotations—similar to those we have already seen above in the transcription of the name of Jesus Christ.

The preference of certain phonograms over others in the spellings of names is, however, by far not limited to pre-modern times. Instead, ameliorative connotations are still commonly met with in contemporary Japan, notably for instance in the phonographic portions of spellings of female personal names. Table 7 gives a selection of representative cases.

As before, it is important to stress that these are connotations implied by the spellings, not the actual meanings of these names in etymological

<footnote n="35">35. For the first variant see, e.g., the preface to *Kenkon bensetsu* 乾坤弁說 (1656). The latter two variants are found (together with a large number of other transcriptions of interest) in *Kirishitan bakyaku ronden* 鬼利至端破却論伝 (I/1r and I/11v respectively), dating from somewhat later in the second half of the 17th century.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36. For the most common variant, 貴理師端, see *Alphabetum japonicum et exemplare* (Biblioteca Casanatense, Ms.2110; reproduced in Doi, 1963, see letter no. 24 on p. 284), or also the 1620 letter addressed (in Japanese with Latin translation) by Christians from Arima and other nearby places to Pope Paul V (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb.or.152 (1); see line 5). The variant spellings 貴理志端 and 貴理志丹 are likewise found in these two sources: see letter no. 26 in Doi (ibid., p. 286) and line 18 in the 1620 letter respectively.</footnote>
<table><caption>TABLE 7. Spellings of female personal names and their connotations</caption><thead><tr><td>Name</td><td>Spelling</td><td>Connotations</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Emiko</td><td>惠美子</td><td>'blessed and beautiful'</td></tr><tr><td>Kaeko</td><td>佳永子</td><td>'auspicious and eternal'</td></tr><tr><td>Michiko</td><td>美智子</td><td>'beautiful and wise'</td></tr><tr><td>Mika</td><td>美香</td><td>'beautiful and fragrant'</td></tr><tr><td>Rie</td><td>理恵</td><td>'reasonable and blessed'</td></tr></tbody></table>

terms. The essentially phonographic nature of these spellings is already suggested by the fact that female first names up until the early 20th century predominantly made use of *hiragana* or *katakana* (Barešová, 2016, pp. 46–47, Barešová, 2017, p. 42), but is also further supported by the existence of many variant spellings: While the names remain the same in their spoken form, different spellings may imply different ‘meanings.’ Most notably, such tendencies in the choice of phonograms also apply to Western names current in Japan. A name such as Erika, for instance, is found written in a multitude of ways including, but not limited to, 愛理花 ('love, reason, flower'), 恵莉佳 ('blessed, jasmine, auspicious') or 瑛里香 ('crystal, village, fragrance'; cf. Barešová, 2016, pp. 210, 215, 217). The existence of entire guide books, not just for choosing a name as such, but also an appropriate written representation of that name, likewise shows a keen awareness of the connotations involved.

In the beginning of this section we have already noted that, in principle, any morphogram can be turned into a phonogram. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that semantically motivated phonograms in the case of sinograms are by no means limited to Japanese, as discussed so far in this section, but are likewise found, e.g., in the modern Chinese writing system. An interesting case without immediate parallels above is the existence of spellings for loanwords, which might be seen as being phonographic in nature, but at the same time lend themselves to a morphographic interpretation. Consider, for example, the spellings of *wéitāmìng* 維他命 'vitamin' and *tuōlāji* 拖拉機 'tractor' as discussed by French (1976, p. 114). While the spellings represent fairly acceptable approximations of the words' pronunciation in the donor language (or its first half in the case of 'tractor'), they might also evoke associations such as '(that which) maintain(s) someone's life' or 'drag-pull machine' respectively. It is self-evident that considerations of both sound and meaning are behind the coining of such spellings, which ultimately also shape the phonological form of the loanword as such. Needless to say, these are rather extreme cases for the involvement of semantic considerations. In examples such as the afore-mentioned *bāshì* 巴士 'bus,' which hardly makes any sense when interpreted as (among other possibili-
ties) 'to wish' plus 'scholar,' we can safely assume that the characters
were chosen based on considerations of sound alone. We are therefore
once more reminded of the fine line dividing graphs intended purely as
phonograms from semantically motivated phonograms.

6. Summary and Conclusions

Building upon an in-depth look at previous scholarship in the field of the
typology of writing systems with a focus on the taxonomies proposed and
respective terminology used, we have posited in section 1 two basic map-
ping types in writing systems, namely morphographic and phonographic
mappings. Crucially, in our understanding of morphography as a map-
ping type between one or more morphemes and one or more graphs, mor-
phemes are seen as linguistic units having *both*: form and function, sound
and meaning. Phonographic mappings are further divided into two sub-
types, depending on whether or not morpheme-specific knowledge is re-
quired from the reader, the writer or both (as is, by definition, also the case
in morphographic mappings). We thus ultimately arrive at a tripartite di-
vision, with morphograms, morphonograms, and phonograms as the ba-
sic functional types of graphs or strings of graphs.

Transitions from morphograms to phonograms and vice versa as
treated in sections 2 and 3 are well attested in the process of script trans-
fer, but also within writing systems. The level of phonology can thus
be demonstrated to be everything but irrelevant to morphography and
morphograms. In order to explain, for instance, that phonograms are
developed on the basis of morphograms on a regular basis, the latter
must not be conceived of as graphs either "denot[ing] the meaning but
not the pronunciation of a morpheme" (Daniels and Bright, 1996, p. xlii)
or as "represent[ing] primarily the meaning (and sometimes secondar-
ily the sound) of one word or morpheme" (Taylor and Taylor, 1983,
p. 21). Instead, the label 'morphography' is to be taken at face value:
Morphographic writing systems are not just "meaning-based systems"
in contradistinction to "sound-based systems" (Cook, 2016, p. 6), but
morpheme-based systems instead.

Transitions from morphograms to phonograms were crucial in shap-
ing various writing systems throughout history, including but by far not
limited to the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, from which the
majority of examples in the preceding sections was taken. As we have
seen in section 3, semanticizations of phonograms and thereby transi-
tions to morphograms also occur regularly, even if on a smaller scale.
We have observed this phenomenon, for instance, with so-called hetero-
grams in Middle Iranian languages as well as with abbreviations, par-
ticularly when borrowed, e.g., from Latin to English. What these two
cases have in common is that some sounds are omitted already in the
donor writing system—whether in the Aramaic abjad or in the case of
Roman-based abbreviations. As incomplete phonographic spellings requiring morpheme-specific knowledge they were eventually borrowed *en bloc* into other writing systems as full-fledged morphograms.

While transitions may thus occur in both directions, the typological status of graphs or strings of graphs at a given time is not always clear-cut, as we have seen in section 4. A solution taking into account the respective productivity of graphs as phonograms seems possible at first, but is only really feasible for both extremes: If a phonogram occurs in the spelling of *one* specific morpheme or string of morphemes only an interpretation as a morphogram appears appropriate. In contrast to this, a phonogram that occurs in the spelling of *any* number of morphemes should be considered a phonogram. For cases in between these two extremes, however, the situation is less clear, leaving us with a large number of disputable or even indeterminable cases.

Our brief survey of a selection of semantically motivated phonograms in section 5 has shown that phonography is, despite what the term itself suggests, not necessarily always purely related to the level of phonology. Instead, the polyvalence of graphs being used as both phonograms and morphograms on different occasions may lead to semantic allusions based on their morphographic usage whenever they are used as phonograms. Certainly not all such allusions readers may 'identify' in a given spelling are intentional in the end, but for a substantial amount of cases it is safe to assume so. Among the questions to be explored in future research is the possibility of semantic allusions in phonographic writing systems *lacking* the above-mentioned polyvalence of graphs. At least in systems traditionally characterized as featuring a deep orthography—in other words: systems involving morphograms on a regular basis, thus providing conventionalized links between specific spellings and morphemes—it is possible to achieve a similar effect by deviating from the conventional spelling of a given morpheme, replacing at least part of it with a spelling associated with another, (near-)homophonous morpheme. This may be illustrated by unconventional spellings along the lines of *<eggceptional>* and *<eggcellent>* (also *<egg-cellent>*, *<EGGcellent>* etc.) for *exceptional* and *excellent* in the context of egg recipes, Easter etc., or *<amazeing>*, *<aMAZEing>* or similar for *amazing* in the context of labyrinths. Here as with the other phenomena addressed, further comparative research is needed.

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# The Interdependence Between Speech and Writing
## Towards a Greater Awareness

Stefano Presutti

*Abstract.* This paper aims to understand how and why new digital media could be useful resources for reaching a greater awareness of the complex relationship between written and oral language. The study analyses this relation during the diachronic evolutionary development of Western societies and its changing perception in Western thinking. Particularly, it examines some examples in the contemporary digitalized world. Using anthropological, historical-linguistic, and sociolinguistic points of view, it illustrates the changing interaction between these two manifestations of language over time. The findings show that the multimodality of new digital media blends the positive aspects of speech, such as the reality and truthfulness of the event, and the positive aspects of writing, such as the reliability and stability of a visual communication. Despite the perception that, in previous periods of time, speech and writing seemed in conflict with each other, today these two modalities of language are both autonomous and simultaneously strongly intertwined, and thus can be seen as two sides of the same coin.

## 1. Introduction

Written and oral language have always been intimately linked in human cultures which also use writing systems to communicate. Along the axes of space and time, the balance between these two modalities of language has constantly evolved according to individual and group needs. Therefore, the study of human languages should consider this relationship.

The written language learning process is often still considered long and “not natural” (Fayol, 2017; Bidaud and Megherbi, 2005), unlike the oral one. In Western societies, writing has been perceived as non-independent and secondary to oral since the Classical Age. That perception has been equally assumed by many contemporary linguists such as von Humboldt (1836), Saussure (1916), Bloomfield (1984), Hockett

<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>
(1958), Martinet (2008), Ducrot and Todorov (1979). However, re-
cent studies of psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics have devel-
oped a very different thesis: during language acquisition in childhood,
the learning process of the orthographic system does not mechanically
reproduce the cognitive path already traced by the phonemic system
learned in earlier years. Indeed, this learning process has a certain
autonomy (Bonin, Pacton, and Fayol, 2001; Rapp, Benzing, and Cara-
mazza, 1997; Rapp and Caramazza, 1997; Bonin, Fayol, and Peereman,
1998) and creates original procedures capable of modifying the oral cog-
nitive structures (Ziegler, Ferrand, and Montant, 2004).

This paper is concerned with the relationships developed between
speech and writing, with emphasis on Western European societies. Par-
ticularly, I have focused on their interdependence in the contemporary
globalized world. Currently, their relationship is becoming increasingly
more complex in the digital arena as it is challenged by intersections of
technical resources and the multiple needs of individuals and language
communities. This study has showcased examples of the ever-shifting
dynamics of these two modalities through anthropological, historical-
linguistic, and sociolinguistic lenses. The primary purpose of this pa-
per was to understand how and why new digital media could be useful
resources for reaching a greater awareness of the complex relationship
between speech and writing.

The remainder of this paper is organized into six chapters. Following
this introduction, I provide the main differences between spoken and
written language and explain how they are differently used by people to
communicate. In the third and fourth chapters, I delve into the percep-
tion of writing in Western societies. I focus on the different steps which
led to the primacy of writing, even if it has generally been perceived
as “secondary” to speech. As opposed to this general idea of writing,
I investigate its real autonomy from speech and their interdependence
through a historical perspective. In the fifth chapter, I focus particularly
on the contemporary situation, in which new digital media upsets their
relationship. I give three examples of their interdependence in the dig-
ital arena. This paper closes with a discussion of the findings and some
future proposals in the sixth and final part.

2. Relationships Between Speech and Writing

Speech and writing can be two modalities of the same language. They
often play complementary roles capable of diversifying communication
in language communities that use both. We, as human beings, can trans-
mit meaning with our whole body through gestures, vocalisations, and
movements. We can use all of our five senses to engage with the outside
world, but in all cultures, verbal expression is the main language sys-
tem of representation. Like speech, writing also constitutes a symbolic
system for representing human thoughts and feelings. It can also be di-
rectly linked to culture—or more cultures—from which it developed and
was used over time.<fnref n="1" />

2.1. Main Features

I describe herein what makes speech and writing two different modali-
ties of language, beginning with five key points and a list of some spe-
cific characteristics.

(a) Firstly, writing revolutionized our relationship with time. Drawing graphic signs on resistant materials—which vary from culture to culture in a diatopic and diachronic way—creates the impression that a message can be deciphered without limits in time. Thus, it donates the illusion of being able to be permanently detached from it. On the contrary, spoken language is inevitably related to the time factor, since it is transmitted through sound. Indeed, it is impossible to stop or crystallize a sound naturally—without technologic tools—in time, just as it is impossible to block the movement of a material object by visually stopping its trajectory.

(b) Writing is durable and can be planned which counterbalances the ephemerality and spontaneity of speech. Sound can therefore be designated as “the most real and evanescent of human sensory objects” (Ong, 1967). Writing transforms speech into an object inscribed in space, thus making language more durable, but at the same time “less real and passive”. From a sensory point of view, the spatialization of the “real” communicative event confirms the increasing supremacy of sight at the expense of hearing.

(c) For spoken language, hearing guides the other senses in communicative perception, whereas in the written context, sight constitutes the main receiver of communication. One of the main differences between sight and hearing is that the former allows the separation of the components of a sensory object, while the latter unifies them by seeking a whole harmony. Speech is more dependent on the context in which the communication happened. On one hand, sight is used in one direction at a time. On the other hand, sound comes simultaneously from all directions. We can immerse ourselves in the sound, but it is impossible to immerse ourselves in the same way in vision (cf. Ong, 1982).

<footnote n="1">1. If we agree with this assumption, we are not questioning the linguistic arbitrariness of sign theorized by Ferdinand de Saussure (1916). We are only assuming that also a graphic sign can never be considered neutral, because it was created and institutionalized in a precise environment, in one—or more than one—specific culture and language community. For further details, see Presutti (2019) and Cardona (2009).</footnote>
(d) Writing transforms language communication into an event that is not necessarily collective. By reducing the impact of the time factor, it frees itself from the individual who produces it, as it were, while at the same time attenuating the scope of the interlocutor. Thus, the phenomenon of writing becomes an individual experience (Goody, 1977). We may, for example, read or study a text that we have written ourselves. Its timeless character therein helps to stimulate the creative process and encourages the recognition of individuality.

Another linked difference could be represented by the dichotomy between noise and silence<fnref n="2" />. In fact, spoken language is necessarily linked with noise and spatial presence of interlocutors, both in terms of production and reception, whereas writing and reading can be individual and silent experiences. In the first era of writing in Western societies, the text was very often declaimed aloud—with or without an audience. After that, as individual reading, both mental and silent, was gradually established, the acoustic component was almost completely lost.

(e) Writing revolutionized mental processes and human modalities related to knowledge. This modality of language froze the form and the content of the message. The fixation of the written text considerably diminished the characteristic oscillations of verbal communication, thus facilitating its institutionalization and creating linguistic models on which society can base itself in both present and future phases. The use of writing also considerably modified the relationship that human thought has with memory and knowledge. Indeed, a writing system makes it possible, for example, to write down useful information to be retained for the near future, leaving the human brain space and energy for other actions. Spelling archiving also leads to an unlimited increase in the amount of relevant information for both the individual and society as a whole. Writing therefore develops specific cognitive and social skills that are different from oral communication. Thus, the fields of external memory and rational (self-)controlled thinking—the ability to plan, to reason about abstract issues, to normalize, and to implement procedures—rise considerably.

In order to compare face-to-face dialogue and traditional writing on paper, I consider some features collected by Clark and Brennan (1991). These two conventional modalities of language show almost opposites characteristics (cf. Table 1). In fact, only the sequentiality feature describes both speech and writing. The other seven aspects of language are present in just one of two modes. Accordingly, copresence, visibility, audibility, cotemporality, and simultaneity are depicted in a traditional speech dialogue. On the contrary, reviewability and revisability can-

<footnote n="2">2. This dichotomy was suggested by the French linguist Gustave Guillaume, quoted by Boone and Joly (1994).</footnote>
not be conformed with the spontaneity and ephemerality of traditional speech.

<table><caption>TABLE 1. Main features of speech and writing (Clark and Brennan, 1991)</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Speech<br>Face-to-face</th><th>Writing<br>Traditional</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Copresence</td><td>+</td><td>-</td></tr><tr><td>Visibility</td><td>+</td><td>-</td></tr><tr><td>Audibility</td><td>+</td><td>-</td></tr><tr><td>Cotemporality</td><td>+</td><td>-</td></tr><tr><td>Simultaneity</td><td>+</td><td>-</td></tr><tr><td>Sequentiality</td><td>+</td><td>+</td></tr><tr><td>Reviewability</td><td>-</td><td>+</td></tr><tr><td>Revisability</td><td>-</td><td>+</td></tr></tbody></table>

## 3. Perception of Writing in Western Societies

In this chapter, I describe how the perception of the relationship between these two modalities of language has undergone considerable changes during the diachronic development of the Western world.

### 3.1. Historical Development

It is possible to highlight four main stages in which the perception of this relationship changed consistently: the origins—which include the ancient era and the Middle Ages—the modern era, the electronic era, and the digital era. In the first period, most of the people who lived in Western European countries were illiterates and the main goal of writing was largely to support oral speech. Written texts were read aloud and there were many oscillations with graphic signs. Consequently, the reader had to interpret what he or she was reading. In the modern era, the invention of movable-type printing in the fifteenth century gave an increasingly more prestigious role to written communication in European countries. This invention was useful for creating models of language and for solving the unpredictability of speech. This phase also marked the attempt to hide the strong link between the two modalities of language. The third period, the electronic era, began in the twentieth century. Globalization and the invention of technologies such as typewriters, televisions, radios, and computers, revolutionized the way we communicate with each other. Finally, in the past three decades, the process of change in the relationship between speech and writing has accelerated enormously with the use of the World Wide Web and new
digital media. In chapter five, I further describe how the interdependence between speech and writing is experiencing a new phase in this present period of time.

## 3.2. Secondary Role and Primacy of Writing

I highlight now the changing perception of speech and writing in Western thinking.

Since the Classical Age, written communication has been perceived as non-independent and secondary to oral communication. In addition, the written language learning process is still today considered in many cases “long and not natural” (Fayol, 2017; Bidaud and Megherbi, 2005), unlike the oral one. Its secondary position in the Western philosophical conception has distant roots. In antiquity, Plato perceived writing as incomplete and cold in relation to speech. In *Phaedrus*, he described writing as a modality of language without the typical vitality of oral due to a lack of intonation, rhythm, or participation of the body. The Platonic consideration of the “coldness” and “distance” of writing—compared to the natural character of oral speech—continued in the modern era with distinguished intellectuals such as Hegel and Rousseau.<fnref n="3" />

The marginal role conferred on written language compared to speech seems even more impressive considering that modern linguistics, as an academic discipline, was born in the nineteenth century through the study of Indo-European and Semitic written languages. The comparative grammar of Neo-Grammarians such as Jones, Bopp, Verner—among others—was based on written forms of language from the beginning. At the time, however, these forms were only perceived as a meaning, a more or less faithful mirror to the spoken language. This secondary position did not induce a real need to study its autonomous nature.

The lack of interest in the written language as a linguistic object was again confirmed in the twentieth century. Illustrious linguists such as Saussure (1916), Bloomfield (1984), and Hockett (1958) considered writing as a mere secondary system, and therefore less relevant to a more in-depth study of language. Martinet (1967) believed that writing was a discipline distinct from linguistics, a “province” of orality. Ducrot and Todorov defined it as an artificial supplement, an unnecessary derivative of speech (1979). The linguist Roman Jakobson defined spelling elements as “symbols of symbols,” and the written system as a successive system not completely independent of speech “because no speech community and none of its participants can acquire and manipulate the graphic pattern without possessing a phonemic system” (Jakobson and

<footnote n="3">3. For further details, see Guritanu (2016) and Presutti (2019).</footnote>
Halle, 1956, pp. 16–17). The structuralism of the 1960s marked a re-
newed interest in writing patterns, but this movement marginalized it
as a linguistic object and included it only in correspondence with the
phonemic system.<fnref n="4" /> Finally, the classification of the primacy of spoken
over written language, which has pervaded Western common thinking,
can be summarised as listed by Stubbs (1980):

- Historically, speech is an older communication than writing;

- Individually, speech is learnt before writing;

- Speech is innate and biological;

- Speech opposes conscious manipulation—it is more difficult to change accent from the one gained naturally;

- In societies, speech comes before writing;

- Writing is a more recent event;

- Speech is used more than writing;

- Speech is used with a higher range of communicative functions.

At the same time, for many centuries until the present one, the writ-
ten form has been considered a truthbearer, more reliable, and a symbol
of order and discipline. Writing has become one of the most valued cog-
nitive habits of modern education, as it proffers the mindsets of objectiv-
ity, analysis, and criticism. The term *literacy*—in the sense of the ability
to read and write—also became associated with learnedness in general,
such as with “visual literacy,” “musical literacy,” and so on. The seman-
tic extension also covered the suffix *-graphy*, used in terms far from the
action of writing such as “choreography,” “scenography,” etc. (Derrida,
1967; Cardona, 2009).

Writing has been considered as the decisive turning point for differ-
entiating, through time and space, which groups of people were more or
less evolved than others. Human cultures without writing systems are
called *pre-literates*. This term is used as a reference point for a system of
signs that do not yet exist in order to designate groups anachronistically.
Furthermore, this term emphasizes the Western alphabet-centric aspect
that the “letter” represents and defines any human writing system.

Along the time axis, writing played a crucial role in the attempt to
hierarchize peoples “with a history” and peoples “preceding history,”
thus strongly linking the Western concept of *history* to the use of graphic
systems to support human memory. Along the spatial axis, writing
has been thought to distinguish so-called “evolved” peoples from prim-
itive or “less evolved” peoples (Presutti, 2019; Canut, 2007; Mbodj-
Pouye, 2013). Derrida (1967) highlighted another paradox: he crit-
icised the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss who associated—in his famous

<footnote n="4">4. Moreover, research was oriented mainly from an alphabetic point of view, an approach not applicable to linguistic systems that do not use the alphabet (cf. Cardona, 2009).</footnote>
masterpiece *Tristes Tropiques*—Western alphabetic writing with a colonialist instrument that deteriorated the purity of the language of colonized people (Lévi-Strauss, 1993). This case presented the existence of a double dichotomy that opposed “people with/without writing” and “primitive/non-primitive people,” again referring to Rousseau’s myth of the *noble savage*.<fnref n="5" /> This allowed him to consider the passage from speech to writing as an instantaneous crossing of a discontinuous line: a passage from an oral language culture—“pure” and far from writing—to a language with a graphic representation used as a new cultural accessory considered to be a technique of oppression.

The ability to read and write has been used to distinguish upper class and wealthy people, men and civilised white European societies, from lower class and not wealthy people—women and children, dialect speakers, foreigners, and colonised language communities. The opposition between writing and speech has also been used to differentiate a language from a dialect. In this way, through writing, a language could assert itself as a noble or prestigious language (cf. Guri-tanu, 2016; Calvet, 2002), whereas dialects were thought to be transmitted primarily through speech and therein lacked the same virtues. Several dichotomies such as complexity/simplicity, wealth/poverty, writing/orality were then established in order to institute a hierarchy among the so-called “historical” European languages and other less standard spoken languages, such as dialects and slang, or pidgin and creole languages still used in many former European colonies in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania (cf. Canut, 2007).

The use of writing generates a large number of consequential factors that enable the linguistic system to establish a more stable and symbiotic relationship with the cultural identity of a group of individuals. It seems that only a solid system of graphic elements, subject to precise spelling rules, allows the language to be codified through the elaboration of dictionaries and grammars, to be institutionalized by a local political government, to be used in the creation of literary and scientific works, and to be taught in schools (Calvet and Calvet, 2013; Canut, 2007; Berruto, 1987).

These considerations allow us to better understand the main causes that led to the predilection of writing for orality in modern Western societies. However, writing has not always been perceived as prestigious or superior to orality, not even as a truthbearer. As Baron wrote:

> When writing was a new and uncommon practice, it was letters on a page, not face-to-face speech, that sparked distrust. When few people could read, and fewer still could write, trusting writing—if trust came at all—required an enormous leap of faith. Plato’s objections aside, writing was still an unproven

<footnote n="5">5. For further details of the myth of *noble savage*, see Erringson (2001).</footnote>
gimmick, and people might have reasoned that at least with the spoken word, they knew who they were talking to, friend, foe, or total stranger. Friends could be trusted. With enemies, you knew where you stood. Strangers had to prove themselves. But words scrawled on a piece of paper, or a sheepskin, or a lump of clay, those were always strangers, always worthy of suspicion. (Baron, 2009, p. 5)

A deeper exploration into the relationship between orality and writing in the Western world reveals the significant variations it has undergone. In Europe, as in China and the Middle East, the first phases that marked the relationship between the written and the oral were characterized by a different sensory organization. Indeed, in ancient societies, most of the population did not have access to texts. Thus the oral—and hearing—retained a privileged function compared to sight. In the classical age, but also later in the Middle Ages, individuals tended to give more credibility to what was read, rather than to what was seen (Ong, 1967). The written word was pronounced aloud and its spelling was characterized by strong fluctuations due to the importance given to each reader's personal interpretation. In the societies of the European Renaissance, writing had, above all, a function of reference to oral culture. Texts maintained the stylistic pattern of oral culture for many centuries.

The first major event that brought about a significant change in the sensory perspective—with the shift from auditory to visual dominance—and completely changed the relationship to graphic forms was the European spread of movable type printing in the fifteenth century. The printing revolution made the “materialization of the word” possible, distancing the text from its author by giving it a kind of coldness and rigidity, and herein authority and prestige. The previous manuscript-based culture was still producer-oriented. The writing of the copyists involved long and costly work, which implied the use of abbreviations and synthetic forms to reduce the effort of production—which did not always favor the understanding of the text. Conversely, the printing revolution almost completely eliminated the obstacles of written production and greater attention was paid to the consumer-reader. Visual character had also become of major importance: the visibility of graphic forms in the page space had improved significantly and fluctuations had decreased considerably (cf. Presutti, 2019). The typographical transformation of the word into a kind of “product-claim” has profoundly changed the Western vision of (and access to) knowledge. Silent reading contributed to the emergence of a new meaning of the “private sphere” among individuals, as has the introduction of a new meaning of the private ownership of words.

The printed text gave the written language an illusory dimension of completeness and an autonomy from the outside world and from the author himself. This contributed to increasing the perception of prestige conferred on text and writing among the groups that used the written
language. Individuals began to trust the printed word, which was then considered a finished product and therefore both closed and complete. The birth and development of modern Western science were also closely linked to the growing predilection for written culture during the period of the European Renaissance. In addition, members of high society began to consider writing a “truthbearer” manifestation of language. This idea was sometimes excessive because it risked obscuring the fundamental importance of its interrelation with orality.<fnref n="6" />

## 4. Autonomy of Writing and the Interdependence with Speech

In this chapter, I further discuss the widespread perception of the “dependence” and “secondary nature” of writing that was shown previously, as well as the description of their relationship as a dichotomy.

Even if writing has a primacy role in contemporary society's communication, the research on written language has encountered many obstacles. Firstly, the phonocentric approach in linguistics greatly delayed the study of writing as an autonomous entity in its own right rather than oral dependent (cf. Berg, 2016). This delay affected not only linguistic research but also that of other social science disciplines. In fact, at least until the middle of the twentieth century, written language was the exclusive domain of linguists, whereas anthropologists were supposed to deal exclusively with “primitive” peoples. As this ethnocentric and early evolutionist term suggests, the populations studied in anthropological research at that time did not have this graphical-cultural invention—otherwise, they could never have been classified as people with “less advanced cultures”—and thus could not have been studied by ethno-anthropologists.

Writing can be defined as the human use of a graphic sign system with a symbolic value. A graphic sign itself cannot yet be considered as a form of writing since it must be included in a larger system of graphic oppositions (Cardona, 2009). The minimum unit of writing is the grapheme, which is preferred to the alphabetic-centric term letter, through which a set of signs forms a graphematic system (Hořejší, 1971).<fnref n="7" /> It seems impossible to

<footnote n="6">6. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, attempts were made in Europe to establish complete control of the spoken language through writing. As previously mentioned, one of the most representative examples concerns the early linguistic studies of the Neo-Grammatician period of the nineteenth century, when the phonemes of the Indo-European and Semitic languages were exclusively studied and compared in relation to corresponding graphemes.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. Hořejší wished to go beyond the distinction between grapheme and phoneme and proposed a unit having these two correspondences: the *graphophoneme*. As he wrote, "In our opinion, the two kinds of 'one-way' correspondences should be replaced by a single mutual or 'two-way' correspondence, and the units *phoneme* and *grapheme*</footnote>
establish a parallelism between the phonemic unit and the spelling unit since the former does not constitute a sign, whereas the grapheme does have a signified and a signifier. The relationship between the grapheme and the phoneme is accurately summarized in the scheme elaborated by Rosiello (1966) and reported in Fig. 1.

<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Relationship between grapheme and phoneme in a language with an alphabetical system (Rosiello, 1966)</figcaption></figure>

A phoneme communicates with a grapheme solely through its meaning. Instead, the form and substance of the writing minimal unit keep a complete autonomy from the phonological one.

One of the first researchers who defined the minimum unit of writing was Josef Vachek, one of the Prague School linguists. In 1939, he took over the research of the Russian Agenor Artymovič on the autonomy of writing from spoken language. Vachek insisted both on their independent nature and on their coexistence within the same language (Ineichen, 1971) while demonstrating that they differ in their linguistic function. The functionalist approach repeatedly developed by the Czechoslovak linguist can be summarised as follows:

The spoken norm of language is a system of phonically manifestable language elements whose function is to react to a given stimulus (which, as a rule, is an urgent one) in a dynamic way, i.e., in a ready and immediate manner, duly expressing not only the purely communicative but also the emotional aspect of the approach of the reacting language user. The written norm of language is a system of graphically manifestable language elements whose function is to react to a given stimulus (which, as a rule, is not an urgent one) in a static way, i.e., in a preservable and easily surveyable manner, concentrating particularly on the purely communicative aspect of the approach of the reacting language user. (Vachek, 1973, pp. 15–16)

In 1944, the Danish linguist Hans J. Uldall considered them to be “only two realizations out of an infinite number of possible systems, of

<footnote>by units each containing the pair of a phoneme or group of phonemes and a grapheme that correspond to each other. We propose to name such units *graphophonemes*." (Hořejší, 1971, p. 189)</footnote>
which no one can be said to be more fundamental than any other” (1944, p. 16). Speech and writing simply coexist and they are mutually non-congruent, expressing the same language, simply transmitted by two different substances such as pulmonary airflow on one side and ink on the other. Lev Vygotskij (1962) added that written language, as a linguistic function in its own right, differs from spoken language not only in its structure but also in the way it functions. A few years later, the classification developed by Ernst Pulgram (1951) on the structural characteristics of the phoneme and grapheme also showed that the only common element between them is that both are conventional sign systems, one of them having as meaning concepts and the other simple sounds.

The differences between spoken and written language emphasized by the aforementioned linguists clearly distance themselves from the common Saussurian view—supported by most linguists in recent decades as mentioned before—that writing is simply language made visible. Unfortunately, in the following years, Vachek and Pulgram were unable to strengthen and expand their theses on the autonomy of written language. Their intuition thus fell partly into oblivion, but in recent years it has been taken up again in neuropsychological research, has definitively opposed the dominant conception according to which written production postulates the existence of compulsory phonological mediation (Geschwind, 1969; Luria, 1970). In fact, more recent studies in neuropsychology have demonstrated a relative autonomy of writing in relation to speech and by examining the cognitive processes involved in the production of these two types of communication (Bonin, Fayol, and Peereman, 1998; Bonin, Pacton, and Fayol, 2001; Rapp, Benzing, and Caramazza, 1997; Rapp and Caramazza, 1997). These recent studies of psycholinguistics found that writing is not cognitively secondary to speech: during a mother tongue learning process, the writing system does not mechanically reproduce the cognitive path already traced by the phonemic system learned in earlier years. Thus, the writing system acquisition has a certain autonomy and creates original procedures capable of modifying oral cognitive structures. To summarize, the common conception of the secondarity of the writing system with respect to the phonemic system and of non-autonomy seems unreliable, even erroneous. Indeed, this view can only be taken into consideration to describe the process of learning the mother tongue at the beginning of a child's life (Ineichen, 1971)<fnref n="8" /> but is not appropriate for the second language acquisition, a process during which learners often receive oral and written input at the same time.

<footnote n="8">8. Individuals from all human cultures learn to speak in the early stages of their growth, whereas in order to write they must wait for a considerably more advanced stage of mental development.</footnote>
Furthermore, their relationship should no longer be thought of as a
dichotomy, but rather as Halliday (1985), Chafe and Danielewicz (1987),
and other more recent linguists suggested: as two modalities of the same
language, as two poles of an intertwined multi-dimensional continuum
(cf. Koch and Oesterreicher, 2012).

In 1985, Halliday noticed that with the technology of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, there is no longer value in obsessively look-
ing for a dichotomy between speech and writing, and it is illogical to
put one manifestation of language before another. Conversely, they
should be considered as manifestations of the language system itself. As
Koch and Oesterreicher (ibid.) pointed out, the relationship between the
phonic and graphic code can be defined as a dichotomy, whereas speech
and writing are two concepts which stand in a continuum of infinite
language possibilities, depending on several parameters such as social
relationship, number, and space-time position of the partners, theme,
socio-cultural context, etc.<fnref n="9" />

5. New Digital Media for a Greater Balance

The previous chapters have deepened the characteristics of the two
modalities of language, as well as how their relationship has been stud-
ied and perceived so far. I now proceed to discuss the main effects of
new digital media on language. In recent years, the relationship be-
tween speech and writing has changed considerably due to the use of
technological tools. They have revitalized the reliability of spoken lan-
guage and they improve some shortcomings of writing such as the ex-
cessive distance with the interlocutor and the lack of simultaneity in
a dialogue. Additionally, they allow for a new balance to be found in
their relationship. Distinctly, there are at least three substantial changes
that new digital media is bringing to the continuum between speech and
writing (reported in Fig. 2). The first one is the possibility to record an
event as it occurs. This authorises the viewer to repeat an accurately
reproduced scene as many times as desired. In this way, it is possible
to avoid all imperfections and uncertainties that can often characterize
the verbal communication. A second change is the dramatic increase
in the number of active readers and writers. This is because new tech-
nologies are increasingly more user-friendly and affordable. As a result,
they entice people to learn not just to write but also to become writ-
ers themselves. A third change is the possibility to talk to multitudes
of people with perfect acoustic conditions. In the past, communication
was limited to smaller audiences and delivered in spaces such as squares
or enclosed theatres. Conversely, today individuals can talk, be heard,

<footnote n="9">9. For further details, see Koch and Oesterreicher (2012).</footnote>
and be watched by anyone they are connected with on the World Wide Web. Moreover, new technology vastly improves the quality of sound through the use of microphones, speakers or loudspeakers, which gives the human voice the possibility to avoid the uncertainty of weather conditions.

<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2. Three changes brought by new digital media today</figcaption></figure>

I herein return to the language features collected by Clark and Brennan (cf. section 2.2). By virtue of new technologies, a more balanced set of characteristics can be found in both modalities of language, which reduces the gap between them when only using traditional face-to-face oral conversation or traditional writing on paper (cf. Table 2).

Now, a verbal communication can be reviewed and revised in recorded audio and corrected by artificial intelligence. In addition, writing tools gain copresence, visibility, audibility, cotemporality, and quasi-simultaneity when used in video chat platforms such as Skype or Zoom, or with virtual assistants such as voice-guided navigation, and voice translation as with Google Translate.

<table><caption>TABLE 2. Main features of speech and writing with traditional communication and new digital media (NDMedia)</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Speech</th><th colspan="2">Writing</th></tr><tr><th>Face-to-face</th><th>NDMedia</th><th>Traditional</th><th>NDMedia</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Copresence</td><td>+</td><td></td><td>-</td><td>+</td></tr><tr><td>Visibility</td><td>+</td><td></td><td>-</td><td>+</td></tr><tr><td>Audibility</td><td>+</td><td></td><td>-</td><td>+</td></tr><tr><td>Cotemporality</td><td>+</td><td></td><td>-</td><td>+</td></tr><tr><td>Simultaneity</td><td>+</td><td></td><td>-</td><td>+</td></tr><tr><td>Sequentiality</td><td>+</td><td></td><td>-</td><td>+</td></tr><tr><td>Reviewability</td><td>-</td><td>+</td><td>+</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Revisability</td><td>-</td><td>+</td><td>+</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

I present three examples in which an original interdependence between speech and writing is evident as a result of new technologies in the digital arena.

The first multimodal example concerns instant messaging (IM) in apps like WhatsApp or Viber. With these software, it is possible to
use quasi-synchronous typed written messages as well as recorded voice
messages. Thus, in chat conversations of everyday life, speech and writ-
ing are strongly intertwined. In fact, users can participate in a dia-
logue comprised of spoken communication only, written communica-
tion only, or both (cf. Fig. 3).

<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. Speech and writing on IM</figcaption></figure>

The second example concerns videoconference communication in platforms like Skype, Google Meet, or Zoom (cf. Fig. 4). During a video call, users can talk or write something on paper or on a whiteboard, akin to a physical meeting or class lesson. In addition, they can simultaneously download and upload spoken and written messages in the video chat. Thus, in this rather commonplace digital media, the space in which it is possible to communicate has been doubled to comprise a three-dimensional space, where two or more interlocutors exist, and a web chat space.

<figure><img src="image_24.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 4. Speech and writing on video chat</figcaption></figure>
The third and final example details the interdependence in pre-recorded videos. The multimodality of using subtitles during a pre-recorded video, such as a movie, highlights the immense and positive change currently underway by virtue of new media. This example was already present in the past decades, before the digital era. However, today as never before, subtitles are used in pre-recorded videos downloaded and watched daily by millions of web-users on platforms like YouTube.

The interdependence between speech and writing is involved in the entire process of publishing a pre-recorded video. As shown in Fig. 5, this intertwined relationship is exhibited, for example, during the writing process of a screenplay (a), during the actors’ rehearsals (b), and also during the video projection with the addition of subtitles (c).

<figure><img src="image_25.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 5. Speech and writing on pre-recorded video</figcaption></figure>

To summarise, these three examples showcase how the multimodality of new digital media thoroughly blends the positive aspects of speech, such as the reality and truthfulness of the event, and the positive aspects of writing, such as the reliability and stability of a visual communication.

## 6. Conclusion

This paper has presented some insights into the relationship between speech and writing over time in Western societies and its perception in Western thinking. This study has shown how complex this relationship is, and yet how much it deserves our full attention at the same time. Because the relationship has changed in the contemporary moment, so too has the way of studying it. Moreover, the digital arena of a globalized world is creating new dynamics, further emphasizing their interdependence. For this reason, new digital media could be useful supports
to help reach a greater awareness of the complex relationship between them. Despite the perceived conflicts between speech and writing in previous periods of time, today these two modalities of language can be considered both autonomous and simultaneously strongly intertwined, as two sides of the same coin.

This paper focused solely on the Western World. It would be beneficial to continue this research by deepening the relationship between speech and writing in non-Western societies, particularly in language communities that use writing systems different from the alphabetical one. Additionally, future studies could contribute to the creation of learning paths used in educational programs in order to bring students toward a greater awareness of the interdependence between speech and writing. To this end, the world's youngest citizens, most involved in the digital revolution, could learn how to manage the complex relationship between these two modalities of human language more effectively. In doing so, they could develop an elevated degree of linguistic flexibility as suitable as possible for the most diverse solutions in the contemporary world.

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<figure><img src="image_26.png" /></figure>
# S₁: The Native Script Effect

Amalia E. Gnanadesikan

*Abstract.* This paper claims that the script that a person learns first qualifies as a native script (S₁) in a manner analogous to a native language (L₁). The cognitive pre-eminence of the S₁ results in a *native script effect*, which accounts for various findings in the synchronic study of second-language acquisition and in the diachronic study of script adoption. The native script effect is argued to be an important factor in the historical preference shown for the adoption of pre-existing scripts over the invention of new ones. The claim that S₁ is like L₁ runs counter to the assumptions of linguists of the structuralist and generative traditions, who are agreed in the belief that writing is not language. Language is considered to be cognitively special, the result of a special grammar-learning module. However, writing may be more like primary language than previously believed, and the specialness of language may in fact cause other systems (such as writing) to be analyzed grammatically and entrained into language, with the native script effect being one notable result.

## 1. Introduction

The fundamental claim of this paper is that literate people have a native script in a way analogous to the way in which they have a native language. That is, the human brain processes a script that is learned early and well in ways that are cognitively similar to how it processes language, with the result that the relationship and interaction between such a first script or scripts (S₁) and a script or scripts learned later (S₂) is similar to the relationship and interaction between a first language or languages (L₁) and language(s) learned later in life (L₂). Furthermore, there are both synchronic and diachronic consequences of the special status of the S₁, collectively called the *native script effect*.

If this claim is correct, then the knowledge (implicit and/or explicit) that a literate person acquires of how a script behaves is analogous to the knowledge that speakers have of language. This implies that scripts have grammar, which in turn implies that writing is more like language than

<figure><img src="image_27.png" /></figure>
many linguists have been taught to believe. Yet it is obvious that pri-
mary (i.e., spoken or signed) language has a special cognitive and evo-
lutionary status in humankind. Writing does not have that status, but
appears to piggyback on primary language to become another modality
of language both historically (phylogenetically) and in the acquisition
of literacy in the individual (ontogenetically).

To explore this topic, this paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 presents definitions—particularly of the term *script*—which will be essential to the rest of the paper. Section 3 briefly outlines the traditional view of the distinction between writing and language in the structuralist and generative traditions, by which writing is not language and a first script therefore could not have a native status akin to that of a native language. Section 4 considers a number of anecdotal and experiential lines of evidence that suggest that native scripts do in fact exist. Section 5 briefly presents results in the existing literature that argue that the differences and interactions between a first script and later-learned scripts are analogous to those between a first language and later-learned languages. Section 6 applies the concept of the native script effect to the history of writing systems, arguing that the cognitive effect of S₁ accounts for the relative rarity of script invention and radical adaptation when previously unwritten languages come to be written. Section 7 returns to the differences and similarities between primary language and writing, conceding that primary language has a special cognitive status but arguing that the specialness of language in the human brain leads to other complex systems, such as writing, becoming entrained in the linguistic system, with the result that writing becomes language. Section 8 concludes with suggestions for the application of the concept of the native script in policy, pedagogy, and linguistic theory.

## 2. Definitions

Before proceeding with the central argument, a few definitions are called
for. By *script* I mean a somewhat abstract "set of graphic signs with pro-
totypical forms and prototypical linguistic functions" (Weingarten, 2011,
p. 16). A *writing system*, by contrast, is the combination of a specific instan-
tiation of a script with the orthographic rules of a specific language. This
use of *script* is in contrast with definitions in which *script* is either synony-
mous with *writing system*, and thus composed of the combination of a sig-
nary and an orthography (e.g., Daniels and Bright, 1996, pp. xliv-xlv), or
is merely the collection of signs (the signary) used in a writing system
(e.g., Daniels, 2018, p. 155). By the definition used here, the script used
in any given written language is *more* than just the signary (since it in-
cludes some information about the linguistic function of the signs) but
*less* than the writing system (since it does not include all the details of a
language-specific orthography). Thus English, Italian, and German all
use the Roman script, but they do not share a single writing system. Similarly, Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali all use the Devanagari script, but again they do not share precisely the same writing system.

It is important for work of the present sort to use a term that allows for the existence of a conceptual entity that is shared across languages. Using the fine-grained level of individual writing system, there is no way to tease apart the process of learning a second language (in a literate context) from that of learning a second writing system: every instance of second language learning in a literate context is an instance of second writing-system learning. However, if we look at the level of script, then it becomes clear that learning some second languages requires learning a new script while learning others doesn't. The two processes can be differentiated.

Looking just at the level of the signary is also the wrong level. For example, the writing systems of English, German, and Italian, or of Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali, share much more than the same basic set of signs. They share important typological features and have many shared or similar values in their linguistic interpretation. Thus, for example, English, German, and Italian use alphabetic letters that write both consonants and vowels, while Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali all use an unwritten "inherent" vowel. In English, German, and Italian, <A>, <E>, <I>, <O> and <U> stand for vowels, and <B> stands for a labial consonant. In Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali, <आ>, <इ>, <उ>, and <ए> stand for vowels, while <ब> stands for a labial consonant. By considering the level of script, we are considering not only a set of largely shared symbols but significant shared ways in how those symbols are used.

In order to study how a learner processes a truly new way of writing, therefore, we must look largely at the level of script. An L₂ may or may not share L₁'s script. Granted, when people learn to read and write they learn these skills within the context of a particular writing system, not merely at the abstract level of script. In this sense a writing system is analogous to a dialect (or language variety) in that each person learns a specific dialect of a language, while the dialects together comprise a more abstract entity known as a language. Similarly, in becoming literate a person learns a specific writing system, and many writing systems may share the same script.

It is also worth noting that there is no claim being made here that monolingualism and monoliteracy are the only options for L₁ and S₁, or are even normative. In this paper any set of scripts learned well at roughly the same time in childhood are considered collectively as S₁, just as any set of languages learned well in early childhood are considered L₁.<fnref n="1" />

<footnote n="1">1. I leave aside for now the question of how first-script literacy that is gained in adulthood might differ from that acquired in childhood. If the analogy with primary</footnote>
### 3. Traditional Assumptions About Language and Writing

Linguists of the American structuralist and generative schools have traditionally held dogmatically to the belief that, as Leonard Bloomfield famously put it, “Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks” (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 21). The same attitude was recorded rather colorfully by Fred Householder when he listed first among “the propositions intuitively felt to be basic by friend and enemy alike” among Bloomfieldian linguists the proposition that “Language is basically speech, and writing is of no theoretical interest” (Householder, 1969, p. 886). This attitude was inherited by the generative school of linguistics and has continued into the twenty-first century, resulting in a dampening effect on efforts to apply linguistic analysis to writing systems. James Myers, for example, describes having abstracts rejected at linguistics conferences with dismissive comments such as, “This paper does not deal with linguistic matters” (Myers, 2019, p. x). I have myself been told after giving a talk on writing systems to a lin- guistics department that “this is not interesting,” on the grounds that writing, not being language, is not about the fundamental character of the human brain.

Indeed, there are important differences between spoken or signed language—which I will collectively call *primary language*—and writing. These differences can be found laid out in any typical introductory lin- guistics textbook in the generative tradition. For example:

> Speaking and writing are different in both origin and practice. Our ability to use language is as old as humankind, and reflects biological and cognitive modification that has occurred in the evolutionary history of our species. *Writing...* is a comparatively recent cultural development, having occurred within the past five thousand years and only in certain parts of the world. The contrast between speech and writing comes into sharper focus when we consider that spoken language is acquired without specific formal instruction, whereas writing must be taught and learned through deliberate effort. There are entire groups of people in the world today, as well as individuals in every literate society, who are unable to write. While spoken language comes naturally to human beings, writing does not. (Dobrovolsky and O'Grady, 1997, p. 553, emphasis in original)

One reason that writing and primary language are considered to be fundamentally different is that primary language is considered to be

<footnote>language holds in this respect, there will be significant differences between the two, since failure to learn a primary language in childhood leaves a person with a permanent language deficit (Pinker, 1994). While the initial acquisition of literacy in adulthood is possible, the acquisition of fluent reading is difficult for adults and relapse into illiteracy is common (Abadzi, 1994). Thus the analogy with primary language may indeed hold. However, the effects of age on first literacy acquisition are not yet well understood (ibid.).</footnote>
special, cognitively speaking, and thus necessarily distinct from other human behaviors, including writing. As mentioned in the quote above, primary language is found everywhere that humans are found. It is therefore claimed (with good reason) that language has a special cognitive place in the human mind—and only in the human mind. Noam Chomsky has long championed

> the Cartesian view that man alone is more than mere automatism, and that it is the possession of true language that is the primary indicator of this...
> (Chomsky, 1964, p. 8)

Or, as Chomsky has more recently put it,

> There is no serious reason today to challenge the Cartesian view that the ability to use linguistic signs to express freely-formed thoughts marks 'the true distinction between man and animal' or machine... (Chomsky, 2000, p. 3)

In the generative framework, the human faculty for language is considered to arise from a "language acquisition device" (Chomsky, 1965, pp. 32–33). This faculty for language has been termed a "language instinct," which is active during the critical period (mostly strongly from birth to the age of six or so, and phasing out by puberty), during which $L_1$ learning takes place automatically and implicitly, without explicit instruction (Pinker, 1994).

By this view, language is cognitively special, but it is specifically the native language that expresses the full range of this cognitive distinctiveness. Thus $L_1$ and $L_2$ learning are fundamentally different. $L_1$ learning, assuming it occurs during the critical period (as might fail to happen to a deaf child of hearing parents, or a child raised under circumstances of unusual social deprivation) is fast, automatic, implicit, and more or less perfect. $L_2$ learning, by contrast, is slow, difficult, and error-ridden, and it leaves the learner with a permanent foreign accent. Furthermore, properties of the $L_1$ will influence a person's ability to perceive and/or learn features of $L_2$, resulting in both positive and negative transfer from $L_1$ to $L_2$ (Ringbom, 1987). In other words, features of the $L_2$ that are similar to $L_1$ will be learned easily (positive transfer), while features of $L_1$ may persist in a learner's use of $L_2$ even when they are not appropriate to that language (negative transfer).

If language is indeed cognitively special and writing is indeed not language, then the relationship between a first-learned script and a later-learned script should not resemble the relationship between $L_1$ and $L_2$. The following sections set out to examine to what extent the difference between $S_1$ and $S_2$ does in fact resemble the difference between $L_1$ and $L_2$. If the differences between the two pairs are similar, that suggests that $S_1$ and $L_1$ may be more similar than the structuralist/generative view would allow. And while that does not undermine
the claim that language has a special cognitive status, it suggests that the special cognitive status of language spills over onto writing in the development of literacy. This point will be returned to in Section 7.

## 4. Impressionistic Evidence for a Native Script

Evidence for the phenomenon of native scripts comes from a number of sources, some admittedly impressionistic and others more rigorous. I begin with the impressionistic. While the interpretations of these impressions may be subjective, I suspect that many adult learners of second scripts will be able to relate to them.

First, fluency in a new script comes frustratingly slowly. An example from personal experience is shown in Figure 1. The non-Roman script on the left is Thaana, the script in which the Maldivian language, Dhivehi, is written (Gnanadesikan, 2012). The Roman-script text on the right is the same text in the official Romanization of Thaana. My personal experience shows that an adult can learn the Thaana script with a day's concentrated effort but that fluency (in the script *as distinct from* the language) takes years. This means, for example, that as an S₂ reader I must *choose* to read a text in Thaana rather than having the reading happen automatically just because my eye landed on it. It makes the text on the right substantially more appealing to me, drawing my eye even against my will. It means, further, that skimming Thaana is difficult to impossible for me, and that I can't read Thaana text upside down, although I have observed S₁ readers do so easily. It means that I cannot automatically (and even involuntarily) pick my own name out of a text as I can with a Roman-script text (as in the transliteration at right), even with some variation in the spelling. Automaticity and fluency do develop over time, but very slowly.

<figure><img src="image_28.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. A short Dhivehi text in the author's S₂ (left) and S₁ (right). (The text reads, 'Dear Amalia. How are you? I and everyone in the family are fine.')</figcaption></figure>

Another example in shown in Figure 2. In this example, in which a short Chinese text is presented for the learning reader in Hànzì (characters) and Pīnyīn (Romanization), the eye of an S₁ Roman-script reader will be drawn to the Pīnyīn, just as it is to the Romanization in Figure 1, despite the fact that the Hànzì characters are larger. The additional point in this example is that the characters, being morphographic,
contain more information than the Pīnyīn does. Each Hánzì charac-
ter uniquely identifies a morpheme, while each Pinyīn syllable could in
principle refer to any of several homophonous morphemes (although in
context the ambiguities are largely resolved, at least for fluent speakers).
Thus both 有 ‘have’ and 友 ‘friend’ are <yǒu> in Pinyin, for example. If
one does not know all of the characters, resorting to the Pīnyīn is ex-
pected. What can be frustrating to S₂ readers, however, is that even
when they do know each character, the Pīnyīn will still ineluctably draw
the eye, depriving them of authentic S₂ reading practice.

<figure><img src="image_29.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2. A short Chinese text in Hánzì and Pīnyīn. The eye of a Roman S₁ reader will be drawn to the Pīnyīn, despite the Hánzì being larger and more informative. Example courtesy of Gitanjali Gnanadesikan. (The text reads, 'I have a black kitten. Her name is Oolong [Black Dragon]. She looks just like a small black panther.')</figcaption></figure>

Another line of evidence comes from the reactions of S₁ readers to
instances of script mimicry. *Script mimicry* is the use of graphs from one
script (or graphs that look like they come from a particular script) as
graphs in another script.<fnref n="2" /> A simple example is Devanagari व्ह, spied on
a yoga T-shirt. The message intended for Roman-script readers who are
not readers of Devanagari is <om>, the sacred syllable of South Asian
religions. A reader of Devanagari, however, will read this as <ṭʰal>, its
actual value in Devanagari. A more extensive case is shown in Figure 3.
While this text is written in English in Roman script, it mimics Japanese

<footnote n="2">2. Alessandrini (1979) uses the term *exotype* to refer to a typeface that, while writing Roman script, is clearly influenced in its letter forms by another script. The font in Figure 3 is an exotype. The term *script mimicry* is related but encompasses a wider range of cases, including ones that use only actual graphs from another script (as in the Devanagari व्ह above), ones that operate between two non-Roman scripts, and ones that occur in handwriting.</footnote>
katakana and kanji, with the result that while an S₁ reader of Roman script can read it after a moment or two's adjustment, an S₁ reader of Japanese—according to anecdotal evidence—will often fail to be able to read it (Raymond Larabie, personal communication). The S₁ exerts too strong a pull to allow for easy decoding as Roman script.

<figure><img src="image_30.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. Script mimicry by Roman script of Japanese katakana and kanji in Electroharmonix font. Example from https://typodermicfonts.com/electroharmonix/, used with permission of Raymond Larabie, the font's designer.</figcaption></figure>

Yet another line of evidence comes from the length of time it takes to learn a language that is written in S₂. Programs of study and measures of success in learning vary greatly, making comparisons difficult in second-language learning. However, a certain degree of standardization can be assumed by considering the courses offered by the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), since the types of use to which the languages are put and the level of proficiency desired for those uses will be comparable across languages. According to FSI's website<fnref n="3" />, languages offered there are divided into four levels of difficulty for (English-speaking) American learners. The languages are tabulated in Table 1.

As shown in Table 1, there are no languages at difficulty level 1 or 2 which have a non-Roman script. In other words, in this sample, rapid language learning (in 36 weeks or less) for S₁ readers of English never involves learning a new script. At level 3, where adequate language proficiency may be achieved after 44 weeks, 28 of the 48 languages use a non-Roman script. In calculating this figure, it was noted that five of the level 3 languages are written in more than one script. In the absence of access to the FSI curricula for these languages, the script that is associated with the language's use as an official national language or its

<footnote n="3">3. Department of State, "Foreign Language Training: Foreign Service Institute," https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/.</footnote>
<table><caption>TABLE 1. Difficulty level and length of time allotted for English speakers to learn non-English languages at the US Foreign Service Institute. (Language counts and difficulty level tabulated from https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/.)</caption><thead><tr><td>Difficulty Level</td><td>Total Languages</td><td>Non-Roman Script</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1 (24-30 weeks)</td><td>9</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>2 (36 weeks)</td><td>5</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>3 (44 weeks)</td><td>48</td><td>28</td></tr><tr><td>4 (88 weeks)</td><td>5</td><td>5</td></tr></tbody></table>

likely use for diplomatic purposes was counted.<fnref n="4" /> At level 4, that of the “super-hard languages” requiring 88 weeks of training, none of the five languages uses the Roman script.

Granted, there is a clear confound here with the degree of relationship between the language itself and English. It is no surprise to find Dutch in level 1, for example. And in fact, all of the level 1 languages (Dutch, Danish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Swedish) are Germanic or Romance languages. However, level 2 includes Swahili (a Bantu language) and Malay and Indonesian (Austronesian languages) beside German and Haitian Creole (a French-based creole). While Swahili, Malay, and Indonesian bear little resemblance to English, they are at least written in the Roman alphabet, sparing the learner the effort of acquiring an S₂.

A final line of suggestive evidence comes from the history of the Cherokee syllabary, famously invented in the early nineteenth century by Sequoyah. When the Cherokee syllabary was first disseminated in the 1820s, “Cherokee children who took up to four years to read and write English reportedly learned the syllabary in a few days and put it to use”; yet by the early 2000s the syllabary was “considered by many native speakers to be an extremely difficult writing system to learn and use” (Bender, 2002, p. 28). Evidently, a significant change in perceived difficulty took place between the early years of the syllabary’s use and the present century. The most plausible cause of this difference was the introduction of universal English-language education. Nowadays Roman script is S₁ for Cherokee children. Not only does this mean that the Cherokee script is, by contrast, S₂, but some of the same sorts of confusion as those caused by deliberate script mimicry are at play, since many

<footnote n="4">4. For example, Azerbaijani (or Azeri) is written in the Roman script in Azerbaijan and in Perso-Arabic script in Iran. Since Azerbaijani is the national language of Azerbaijan, an independent nation to which a US diplomatic mission is posted, but is not the official language of Iran, Azerbaijani is considered for the purposes of Table 1 to be written in Roman script.</footnote>
Cherokee signs resemble Roman letters. For example, Cherokee <W> is /la/ and <D> is /a/.

## 5. Synchronic Consequences of a Native Script

Once the possibility of a native script is allowed, a number of results in the existing literature can be interpreted as consequences for the special status of S₁ and its primacy over S₂, analogous to the primacy of L₁ over L₂. L₁ learning is characterized as fast, implicit, and complete, while L₂ learning is slow, often mediated by explicit instruction, and incomplete (leaving an accent, and affected by both positive and negative transfer from L₁). The relationship between S₁ and S₂ is surprisingly similar. This section lists briefly a few works that make this point.

First, acquisition of adequate fluency in S₂ is painfully slow, as already mentioned to in Section 4. As Elliott (2012) puts it, “Inefficient decoding can quickly lead to frustration and diminishing motivation, in turn resulting in less reading practice/time on task” (ibid., p. 66). Elliott suggests that learners may need practice with simplified texts, as authentic texts may well be too difficult.

Secondly, there is evidence for an analog to a foreign accent in handwriting. Certain hand motions are more or less characteristic of one script as compared to another, particularly if the two scripts run in opposite direction. Machine learning experiments have succeeded at distinguishing between S₁ and S₂ writers of Arabic script with 100% accuracy at the document level (Farooq, Lorigo, and Govindaraju, 2006), and between S₁ and S₂ writers of Roman-script English (where the S₂ writers have various scripts native to India as S₁) with up to 97.67% accuracy (Ramaiah, Utkarsh, and Venu, 2012).<fnref n="5" /> Furthermore, efforts to identify the specific accent (i.e., the specific S₁, Chinese Hànzì or De-vanagari) of S₂ writers of English with machine learning have achieved up to 89.19% accuracy (Ramaiah, Arti, and Venu, 2013).

Thirdly, scripts are sensitive to transfer from S₁ to S₂. An extensive body of research reviewed by Bassetti (2013) shows that literacy skills transfer to a new writing system, but that such a new writing system is more easily learned if the new writing system is typologically similar

<footnote n="5">5. A potential confound that the authors do not discuss is that Roman script as written in different parts of the world (in this case India and the United States) may have different regional “accents,” separately from any effect of whether they are a person’s first or second script. Thus even an S₁ writer of Roman script schooled India may write detectably differently than an S₁ writer of Roman script schooled in the United States. However, this possibility does not negate the existence of accent in handwriting; it merely adds to the kinds of accents that one should expect. As such it strengthens the analogy with spoken accents, which may be either regional or foreign.</footnote>
to the previously learned one, allowing positive transfer.<fnref n="6" /> As in pri-
mary language learning, where bilingualism is an advantage in learning
a third (or subsequent) language, biliteracy is an advantage in learning a
third writing system. Negative transfer occurs when readers read a word
incorrectly, assigning values that would be correct in their native writ-
ing system. While the examples Bassetti cites occur within a script (e.g.,
English speakers reading Spanish <v> as /v/ rather than /b/), my own
experience with learning Thaana (shown above in Figure 1) included
frustratingly many misreadings of ↘ as /v/ rather than the correct /k/.

An S₂ may be read with different neural processing patterns depend-
ing on the S₁, showing that the transfer from S₁ to S₂ happens at a neuro-
logical level. For example, Kim, Liu, and Cao (2017) found that Chinese
S₁ and Korean S₁ readers showed different brain activation when read-
ing English, the Korean S₁ readers showing more activation in the right
inferior frontal gyrus than the Chinese S₁ readers. This was attributed
to the fact that the Korean writing system encodes phonemes but the
Chinese writing system does not. Chinese S₁ readers showed more ac-
tivation in the left middle frontal gyrus, an area which is particularly
active in S₁ Chinese reading.

Despite the commonalities between S₁ and L₁ described in the pre-
ceding few paragraphs, the obvious failure of the parallel between S₁ and
L₁ is that S₁ is explicitly taught, as mentioned in Section 3. Children
are taught to read and write but learn to speak and understand their L₁
automatically, without explicit instruction. Nevertheless, there is evi-
dence that some learning of a writing system is implicit. For example,
Pacton, Perruchet, Fayol, and Cleeremans (2001) report on an exper-
iment in which children learning to read and write in French showed
sensitivity to aspects of French orthography that they are never taught.
Specifically, they learned implicitly that French vowel letters are never
doubled and that only certain consonant letters are.

Additional evidence for implicit learning comes from Tsai and Nunes
(2003), who present evidence that children learning Chinese Hànzi
(characters) in Taiwan, where character structure is not explicitly
taught, nevertheless internalize the schemas of character composition
and become increasingly adept at judging whether a novel character
conforms to the schemas between five and nine years of age.

To summarize this section, not only does S₂ involve greater difficulty,
a foreign “accent,” and other types of transfer from S₁, but the S₁ is to

<footnote n="6">6. Bassetti (2013) discusses biliteracy at the level of the writing system (more specific than that of script), so I have used that wording here. Any difference of script implies a difference of writing system. Not all differences of writing system involve a difference of script, but just as one speaks only a specific variety of one's native language as L₁, the S₁ will be instantiated in a specific writing system, so that similar but weaker S₁ effects should be expected across writing systems that share a script. See Section 6 for more on within-script S₁ effects.</footnote>
some extent learned implicitly, strengthening the analogy with L₁. Admittedly, it could be argued that the difficulties associated with switching from S₁ to S₂ are merely the same sorts of difficulties associated with overcoming any ingrained habit, such as driving on the right-hand or the left-hand side of the road. However, the same argument could then be made for primary language being simply a habit, since the difficulties of switching from L₁ to L₂ are analogous to those of switching from S₁ to S₂. The similarities in the relationship between S₁ and S₂ to the relationship between L₁ and L₂ suggests that script and primary language are in the same boat, whether because of the operation of a special language instinct or merely habit.

## 6. Diachronic Consequences of a Native Script

This section turns to the diachronic consequences of literate people having a native script, an application not made elsewhere in the literature, to my knowledge. I claim here that the native script effect is the answer to a question that is not often asked but deserves to be, namely, why are there so few scripts in the world? This is not a question about the number of languages that are written as compared to the number of languages that are not written. Rather, it is a question about why so many languages share a script, despite large differences in their phonological and morphological characteristics that would suggest that different scripts would be more appropriate for them. While some scripts (such as Thaana) are indeed confined to a single language, other scripts have come to be used for many languages. In fact, a few blockbuster scripts, such as Roman, Cyrillic, and Arabic, dominate the world. Why is this the case? Why is innovation so rare in the history of script design?<fnref n="7" />

When a language first comes to be written, there are in theory three ways in which the pairing of a language and script could come about. The first, the independent invention of writing, characterized the first scripts of their respective cultural spheres (such as Sumerian cuneiform or the oldest Chinese writing). In such a case people who have no prior knowledge of writing invent a way to write. The second way, script invention by stimulus diffusion, starts from the background knowledge that writing exists but is not beholden to a prior script for its design features. A famous example of this type is the Cherokee syllabary mentioned in Section 4, since Sequoyah was aware of the existence of writing but was not literate before he invented the Cherokee syllabary. The

<footnote n="7">7. I have elsewhere commented on such lack of innovation in the history of writing by calling the alphabet "a monument to ... hidebound conservatism" (Gnanadesikan, 2009, p. 143).</footnote>
third way, script adoption, is the use of a pre-existing script for the
newly written language.

In practice, the first type (creation *de novo*) no longer occurs, since
some knowledge of the existence of writing has spread to every, or vir-
tually every, part of the globe. Also in practice, there is something of
a spectrum between the second and third types. In other words, there
is a spectrum between the invention of a completely new script and the
wholesale adoption of a pre-existing script, with some scripts becoming
substantially adapted in the transfer to a new language. For example,
the Roman alphabet arose from the Greek alphabet and is very similar
to it but different enough to qualify as a different script. Nevertheless,
the question remains: Why is the end of the spectrum nearer to outright
adoption as common as it is? Why don't large typological differences
between languages more often lead to large differences in script?

Examples of scripts being borrowed more or less wholesale abound.
A few examples (taken from Gnanadesikan, 2009) will suffice here. Chi-
nese characters (Hànzi) were historically adopted to write Vietnamese,
Korean, and Japanese, none of which are Sino-Tibetan languages, and
two of which (Korean and Japanese) are morphologically synthetic as
opposed to Chinese, which is morphologically analytic. The Aramaic
script spread from Syria to Manchuria over the course of about two and
a half millennia. In the process it spread from Semitic languages to
Indo-European languages to Turkic, Mongolic, and finally Tungus lan-
guages. The letter forms were quite different by the time they came to
be used for Manchu—and the direction of writing had rotated by ninety
degrees—but at each step along the way the changes were relatively mi-
nor. More recently, the Cyrillic alphabet has come to be used for many
minority languages of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic as
used for the Slavic language Russian has 33 letters (of which 21 are con-
sonants), yet it has been adapted to write the Northwest Caucasian lan-
guages Abkhaz and Karbardian, each with about 50 consonants. Simi-
larly, the Roman alphabet, with 21 consonants and 5 vowels, has come
to be used for languages as diverse as Vietnamese, an Austroasiatic lan-
guage with 11 vowels and 6 tones, and Xhosa, a Bantu language with 12
clicks and 43 other consonants (Baker, 1997). Simple metrics of the fit of
the script to the phonology of the languages would surely suggest that
these sorts of script adoptions would be dispreferred.

While in some cases extra letters or diacritics may be added, as in
Vietnamese, in many cases digraphs (and even trigraphs) are called on
to stretch the script to fit the language, as in Xhosa. Going so far as to
alter the inventory of letters is rare, however. Baker notes that "Strong
objections to the very idea of using special characters in orthography
design are sometimes held by otherwise rational people, and seem to
stem from a deep-rooted conviction that the Roman alphabet is some-
how inviolable" (ibid., p. 137).
A similar pattern of preference for an existing writing system can be seen not just in the choice of script as a whole but also within a script in the choice of specific orthographies. Grenoble and Whaley (2006) discuss several cases where orthography designs for minority languages have failed or succeeded depending on how similar they were to the orthographies of the majority languages with which the speakers of the minority languages were familiar. Thus two orthographies designed for Coreguaje (a Tucanoan language) failed because they were not enough like Spanish. An orthography modeled after French designed for Athapaskan languages failed because most of the speakers were familiar with English orthography. On the other hand, the orthography for Zapotec (an Oto-Manguean language), based on Spanish orthography, has succeeded despite a poor match with the Zapotec phonology, since Spanish is the language of education in the Zapotec area.

There are many reasons for the spread of a script. The Arabic script, for example, spread along with Islam as the script of the Holy Qur'an (Kaye, 1996). However, the existence of a native script effect suggests that at least some of the reason for the frequency of script spread as compared to the rarity of script invention lies in cognitive factors.

The situation is shown schematically in Figure 4. If a native speaker of an unwritten language (that person's L₁) receives an education, it will be in the regional written language of education (that person's L₂). The speaker therefore learns to read in the script of the L₂. The upshot of this situation is that *the speaker's S₁ is the script associated with the speaker's L₂*. This kind of situation is extremely common historically, from the days of Akkadian students learning Sumerian cuneiform to minority children learning majority languages across the world today.

<figure><img src="image_31.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 4. A schematic showing how the script of a language learned for educational purposes becomes S₁ and will therefore tend to be adopted for a previously unwritten L₁.</figcaption></figure>

Once S₁ is established as the native script, if the speakers of L₁ want to write their language, there will be a strong predilection for using S₁
(L₂'s script). While a different script might be invented or adopted, it will be at a cognitive disadvantage, since it will be competing with S₁.

The natural consequence, therefore, of literate people having a native script is that existing scripts spread. The trend is as old as the adaptation of cuneiform to write Akkadian in the third millennium BCE. And the more powerful a script is, the more it will continue to spread. Educators, missionaries, and policy makers who are not native speakers of the L₁ of Figure 4 but are often native readers of S₁ also play a role, since they too are cognitively biased in favor of their S₁. Their role in the history of script adoption is perhaps more expected, however, as yet another case of domination and/or imperialism by cultural elites. My claim here, however, is that cognitive factors influence all players—including the speakers of the previously unwritten language themselves—toward the adoption of a previously existing, commonly known script, and against script invention. While the invention of new scripts by previously literate individuals for their native languages does happen, as in the case of King Sejong's invention of Han'gŭl for Korean (Kim, 2005) or the invention of Thaana for Dhivehi (Gnanadesikan, 2012), it is relatively rare.<fnref n="8" />

## 7. Is Writing Language?

If there really is a native script effect similar to the native language effect, then writing and primary language have significant properties in common, which implies writing cannot be merely dismissed as irrelevant to language, as Bloomfield so famously did. But then what actually is the relationship between the two? Is writing language or not?

While many of the special properties of a native language are also found in a native script (including even some implicit learning), it is also clear that writing and primary language are different in important neurocognitive respects. As mentioned earlier in Section 3, primary language is a universal of human societies, while writing is a later and spotily adopted invention. Additionally, different types of writing systems are processed differently in the brain, a fact that allows for the detection

<footnote n="8">8. I suspect that these cases are examples of the *biliterate advantage* (Bassetti, 2013), by which readers who already know two writing systems are advantaged in learning (or in this case, designing) a third. King Sejong knew Hànzi script and is believed by some to have been inspired by 'Phags pa (Ledyard, 1966). Whether or not he knew 'Phags pa specifically, he would have been well positioned to learn other scripts, as his school for diplomats offered classes in several foreign languages (Ledyard, 1997). The inventor of Thaana clearly knew both Arabic script and an older indigenous writing system, as features of both are incorporated in the design of Thaana (Gnanadesikan, 2012).</footnote>
of neurological transfer from S₁ to S₂ of the type documented by Kim, Liu, and Cao (2017) and discussed in Section 5.

What we have, then, is a system that acts very much like primary language in some ways but is clearly distinct from it in certain other important ways. How essential are these differences?

Primary language, whether spoken or signed, is believed to be unique because it uses an inborn, implicitly acting grammar-learning module. It is a rule-based (grammatical) system. Yet writing, though not inborn, can also be described as a grammatical system. Myers (2019), for example, analyzes the Chinese script as having a grammar—that is, as following rules of wellformedness—both in its formal properties and in users' processing of it. On another tack altogether, the stroke order of writing letters in both English and Hebrew has been successfully modelled using Optimality Theory, a theoretical paradigm developed for and primarily used to model phonological grammar (Ellenblum, 2019).

One way to resolve the tension between the similarities and dissimilarities between primary language and writing—between the innateness of only primary language on the one hand and the grammar-based properties of both primary language and writing on the other—is suggested by James Myers when he states that “Once this flexible neural system [of language/grammar] evolved, it may have become as trigger-happy as our face-processing system (which detects ‘faces’ anywhere, even in clouds), automatically switching on whenever it encounters any sufficiently complex communication challenge” (Myers, 2019, p. 22). In other words, the grammar-building language instinct is so strong that it entrains other communicative systems into its orbit. If this is so, then it is no surprise that scripts show grammatical properties and other similarities to primary language.

The view that emerges here is that language is indeed cognitively special but that this specialness lies not so much in being unique but in being overpowering. That is, the language module(s) of the brain will process as language—as grammatically constituted—as many systems as it can. For a literate individual, that includes writing.

The upshot is that while writing does not start out as language, it *becomes* language. This is true both phylogenetically (in the origins of writing) and ontogenetically (in the acquisition of writing by an individual). Historically, writing was not invented to be language. It was not even invented to *record* language but rather to record certain types of information. “[E]arly writing did not reflect spoken language, nor was it invented to do so.” (Woods, 2010, p. 20). The world’s earliest writing systems, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, took half a millennium or so before they “achieved a relatively full notation of language, including its grammar” (Baines, 2004, p. 150). Yet today the recording of language is considered by many scholars of writing systems to be essential to the
definition of writing (e.g., Gelb, 1963, p. 13; Rogers, 2005, p. 2; Daniels, 2018, p. 157).

Similarly, in the life of the individual it is the primary (spoken or signed) language that is learned with the full drive of the language instinct. The written language requires some explicit instruction. But, as noted above, children learning to read also learn aspects of their writing system implicitly, suggesting that they are applying their grammatical system to entrain language.

The question of whether writing is language may not be answerable with a simple yes or no. My claim here is that writing *becomes* language.

## 8. Conclusions and Applications

This paper has argued that a literate person's first script has a special cognitive status—including pre-eminence over later-learned scripts—that is analogous to the special status of a native language. In other words, a literate person has a native script. Other scripts learned later in life suffer the same sorts of disadvantages as second languages: learners find them hard to process, use them with an accent, and experience transfer from their $S_1$.

This paper applies the concept of a native script to the historical preference for adopting existing scripts and the comparative rarity of newly invented scripts. Native speakers of an unwritten language who are educated in a written language will have the script of that non-native written language as their $S_1$. Thus educated speakers of the language, educators, and policy makers will all tend to agree in the identity of, and their preference for, their $S_1$. This preference for $S_1$ means that an established script spreads, even more so than the language with which it is originally associated. The result is a world with many written language but remarkably few different scripts.<fnref n="9" />

The various synchronic consequences of the native script effect are worth considering. These effects occur in the areas of pedagogy and policy. In pedagogy, the question arises of when Romanization should be used in second-language instruction (Elliott, 2012). In Figures 1 and 2 above, the Romanization was a distraction, reducing $S_2$ input for the learner. On the other hand, if all $L_2$ input must be filtered through a slowly and painfully read $S_2$, language learning as a whole will be slowed

<footnote n="9">9. A partial exception is the linguistic area of South Asia, where many different scripts are used and “there is... a widespread feeling that a self-respecting language should have its own unique script to confirm its status as a language” (Masica, 1996, p. 774). Even though this feeling has led to the invention of a number of scripts for previously unwritten languages, even in South Asia many minority languages are written in the script of the official state language.</footnote>
and perhaps even abandoned. The best way to use Romanization and when to withdraw it is a question that merits further research.

In orthographic policy, the choice of a script—and of a specific orthography within a script—for a newly written language is likely to involve the native script effect on the part of literate speakers in the community, educators from outside the community, and sometimes even professional linguists. The examples cited earlier from Grenoble and Whaley (2006) and Baker (1997) show this. While the prior existence of a native script for some members of a community does not necessarily imply that that script should be chosen (or not chosen), it may be useful to be aware of the native script effect as one factor influencing speakers' preferences.

There are also consequences to linguistic theory in the native script effect. On the one hand, if scripts have grammar and behave like language, becoming entrained by the brain into the grammatical system, then the study of writing is a more legitimate undertaking for linguists than previously believed by members of the structuralist and generative schools. And the tools and models of linguistics (such as Optimality Theory, as in Ellenblum, 2019) can be appropriately used to study writing.

On the other hand, one implication of the native script effect is that linguists themselves are influenced by their native scripts. This has consequences for linguistic theory, especially phonological theory. For example, the concept of the phoneme developed in the context of alphabetic writing, while the phonological existence of the syllable was slower to gain acceptance in modern linguistics (though well established in other contexts). Famously, Chomsky and Halle's *Sound Pattern of English* (1968) does not contain the word *syllable* (the term *syllabic* is used, but is a feature of vowels). The insight that one's script influences one's view of phonology is not new. The influence of alphabetic writing on phonological theory is noted by Aronoff (1992), who describes “segmentalism” in linguistics, and even more strongly by Faber (1992), who argues that phonemes are no more than epiphenomena of alphabetic literacy. More recently, Port and Leary (2005) have argued that phonological theory has made a fundamental error in positing that the phonological system acts on symbolic, graph-like entities.

In evaluating such claims in light of the native script effect, it is on the one hand possible that Western phonologists have been fooled by their native script into creating a phonological theory that resembles their script. On the other hand, it is also reasonable to suppose that typological features, such as phoneme-sized units, that survive in writing systems (having been successfully grammaticalized by the language system) can be expected to have analogs in primary language, even if such units are not the only valid levels of analysis. A more thoughtful aware-
ness of how writing and primary language interact will be to the benefit
of the study of both.

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<figure><img src="image_32.png" /></figure>
# On Being a Grapholinguist

Dimitrios Meletis

*Abstract.* In this essay, I discuss the challenges of (engaging in) grapholinguistics, a young field that focuses on writing, a topic mostly marginalized within 'mainstream' linguistics to this day. Issues that are raised include the lack of writing-related classes in linguistic study programs, institutionalization (e.g., departments or chairs for grapholinguistics), and pertinent publication and presentation outlets. Furthermore, the essay highlights problems caused by the interdisciplinarity of grapholinguistics, including linguistic, theoretical, methodological, and terminological boundaries that must be crossed. These issues are partially addressed through a personal lens, i.e. my own 'journey' in the field thus far. This allows me to speak from (some) experience not only about the risks of focusing on a topic at the periphery of many disciplines and some of the setbacks this entails but also about my motivation behind proposing a (sketch of a) theory of writing in my PhD thesis that—based on linguistic Naturalness Theory—aims to offer a unified descriptive and explanatory framework for studying writing systems and writing in general. It also gives me a chance to argue that writing, which can be studied with many of the concepts firmly established in other fields of linguistics (as well as additional writing-specific concepts), is central to every language that is spoken, signed and written in literate language communities and should therefore be an integral rather than an optional part of linguistic theories and paradigms in general. Essentially, this essay highlights why doing research in grapholinguistics should be embraced rather than justified.

The *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century* conference was a chance for many people from different disciplines¹ to get together and present their writing-related research—research whose breadth is showcased by the contributions in the present proceedings. Interestingly, despite the encouraging vibrance of such conferences (to which one can also count the workshops of the *Association of Written Language and Literacy*), even well into the 21st century, the perception of a coherent discipline dealing with all

Dimitrios Meletis

<figure><img src="image_33.png" /></figure>

0000-0002-8889-6459

Schönberggasse 9, 8001 Zurich, Switzerland

E-mail: dimitrios.meletis@outlook.com

1. According to the conference website (https://grafematik2020.sciencesconf.org/, December 7th, 2020), these were computer science and information technology, linguistics, communication, pedagogy, psychology, history, and the social sciences.

Y. Haralambous (Ed.), *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century 2020. Proceedings*

Grapholinguistics and Its Applications (ISSN: 2681-8566, e-ISSN: 2534-5192), Vol. 4.

Fluxus Editions, Brest, 2021, pp. 125-141. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-graf-mele

ISBN: 978-2-9570549-6-1, e-ISBN: 978-2-9570549-8-5
questions pertaining to writing, i.e., a 'grapholinguistics' (or grammatology, or graphonomy, or whatever one prefers to call it, really),<fnref n="2" /> is everything but widespread. And this is not only a terminological problem—yes, researchers invested in writing (often unproductively) disagree on how to call such a discipline (in English<fnref n="3" />) and the concepts studied by it and spend a lot of time arguing about labels (cf. a note on terminology below)—but, more importantly, an issue deeply rooted in the history of linguistics and the (mis)treatment of writing as an object of research. It is also a problem caused by the unwillingness to move beyond one's own disciplinary boundaries and outside of one's comfort zone. In this essay, I will reflect on the discipline and its slow but steady emancipation, partially through the lens of my personal journey in it.<fnref n="4" />

My personal interest in writing was already strong when I started my studies in linguistics in 2010. Soon, however, I had to realize that writing was not covered in the classes I took (at the University of Graz, Austria), and sadly (but unsurprisingly), there also existed no classes specifically dedicated to the topic of writing. Yet, my interest persisted, and as soon as I had mastered the basics of linguistics, I insisted on working on writing-related questions, having to do so under the pre-text of other disciplines so that my professors would tolerate it. As a result, the first thesis that I wrote was psycholinguistic in nature—but it focused on the comma. The second thesis likewise incorporated a psycholinguistic perspective, if only partially—it dealt primarily with the formal and material aspects of writing, something that, according

<footnote n="2">2. As I argue elsewhere (cf. Meletis, 2020a), the term *grapholinguistics* highlights that, following the narrow definition of writing—in which it is defined exclusively as a system relating to language (and not ideas, referents, etc.)—writing is always tied to language, which is of course the subject at the center of linguistics. Notably, this does not change no matter from which perspective (or discipline) one studies writing and thus does not contradict the field’s interdisciplinarity. Also, the term is similar to terms such as *sociolinguistics* and *psycholinguistics* that also designate interdisciplinary fields with questions of language at their core. However, unlike them, *grapholinguistics* does not merge only two disciplines (like psycholinguistics, which is at the interface of psychology and linguistics, for example) but the *grapho-* is meant to include all disciplines interested in writing. Lastly, German *Grapholinguistik* was given as a synonym of *Schriftlinguistik* by the term’s founder, Dieter Nerius (cf. Nerius, 1988, p. 1), which *grapholinguistics* acknowledges.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. In German, there is no terminological debate: the term *Schriftlinguistik* (see below) has been adopted and is, at this point, well-established.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. I am well aware that it is wholly uncommon—especially for a young and little-established researcher—to write an essay reflecting on a discipline (and a personal one on top of that). But when Yannis Haralambous, organizer of the conference and editor of these proceedings, invited me to do so, I still agreed because it is a chance to share my views on a topic that is, evidently, of personal importance to me. Of course, all views here are my own, and (however general they are phrased) they are based on my own experience in the field; I do not mean to speak for others.</footnote>
to the structuralist-oriented branch of German research on writing, is treated by a field called *graphetics* (a term in part analogous to *phonetics*).<fnref n="5" /> After that, at least in my department, I was already known as ‘that writing guy’ (word does get around quickly if your interests are ‘non-traditional’). Unsurprisingly, for my PhD thesis, arguably the first big project in which one can (or better *must*) show academic independence, I had to go all the way (see below). All of this was, of course, only possible because my supervisors had a certain openness to (or even curiosity for) topics that were new and foreign to them and trusted that I knew what I was doing. The flip side of the coin is that as soon as they saw potential in me and believed I could advance to an academic career, they warned me about the risk or even aimlessness of devoting myself to a topic that (from their point of view) stands at the very periphery of linguistics, far removed from what is considered mainstream. As you are reading this, you already know how I decided.

Funnily, even if the predominant lack of writing-related classes in linguistics programs implies it, it is not as if linguistics has ignored writing completely. In 1952, with Gelb’s *A Study of Writing*, an important and influential book was published on the topic. In 1988, in the German-language area, the term *Schriftlinguistik* was first used (cf. Nerius and Augst, 1988). In 2002, a successful textbook on said Schriftlinguistik was released that has since been (re)incarnated in five editions (the latest being Dürscheid, 2016). In the late 1990’s, with the workshops of the *Association of Written Language and Literacy*, a writing-related conference series emerged and the first journal explicitly dedicated to writing was founded—*Written Language and Literacy*. In 2018, Peter T. Daniels, widely considered the most important scholar invested in historical and typological aspects of writing, published a book encompassing decades of his research. In 2019, an open-access book series was conceived that is explicitly devoted to grapholinguistics, *Grapholinguistics and Its Applications*. And in 2020, a chair for Schriftlinguistik was advertised at the University of Hamburg.

By only looking at this very selective list of highlights in the history of grapholinguistics, it is undeniable that there have been (and still are) many (ongoing) positive developments. Within the exclusive club of ‘grapholinguists’ (or whatever one might call them/us), that is. This exclusivity gets palpable when you attend a general linguistics conference, where it may happen that you’re treated as if you were an alien—by linguists who, of course, all know what a phoneme or a morpheme is (as do you), since that is uncontroversially considered required knowledge among linguists, but often have no idea about even the basic concepts of writing, which is again a symptom of the general lack of writing-related classes in the curricula of linguistic programs and the low status it oc-

<footnote n="5">5. A modified version of this thesis was published as a book, Meletis (2015).</footnote>
cupies in linguistics in general. Concerning said status, it certainly does not help that one of the few journals specifically devoted to writing, *Writing Systems Research*, was ceased in 2020 (see below for other journals). In a note in the final issue, the publisher states as a reason “difficult decisions about where and how [publishers, editors, and authors] focus their attention” and thanks “the readers and authors from across the world, for your support and commitment to the Journal’s vision of creating a community around shared interests in writing systems” (Routledge and Francis, 2019, p. 239). Well, a community that now has lost an important outlet for publishing its research. Let me explain why this is by no means a trivial loss, again with a personal example.

For one paper that I wrote, I intentionally attempted to find a journal that was *not* specifically focused on writing since I believe once in a while it is important to underline in the context of general linguistic journals that writing is a phenomenon that people are studying (and thereby show that it is worthy of linguistic study). I will not name the journals here, but the paper was rejected three times. The first two times, the editors had not read the paper and had not sent it out to reviewers. In the first of those cases, the editor asked me whether I had even familiarized myself with the content the journal publishes (I had) and explained to me that, even though this is a journal about reading and writing, and structural, i.e., descriptive works on writing systems had been published there before, my research did not fit the journal. The editor of the second journal, a fairly young open access journal, responded almost immediately that my paper sounded very interesting but that it unfortunately would not fit the journal. Honestly, it does get a bit frustrating when you are rejected not on the grounds of poor quality of your work but because of what you chose to work on. At the third journal, finally, the editors did read my paper, and according to the editor who then sent me the rejection, they had discussed my paper and came to the conclusion that it is interesting and good but does not fit the journal—it would rather be a good fit for a handbook (well, show me a handbook and I’ll gladly submit it there). I was on the verge of giving up when the fourth journal (fortunately also a general linguistics journal) sent my paper out to reviewers. A few months later I was sent two of the most positive reviews I have ever received, and soon after, my paper was published. This leads me back to what I said before: that *Writing Systems Research* was ceased is not trivial. We *need* journals for (purely) grapholinguistic research. I want to complement this with an example that additionally highlights the relevance of grapholinguistic conferences: as James Myers, whose illuminating and innovative work on the Chinese writing system was published in Myers (2019) and, in my opinion, is an invaluable contribution to grapholinguistics, noted anecdotally at *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century*, a paper in which he aimed to present his writing-related research was rejected at a linguistics conference. The first negative review
(which is available to read on Myers' website),<fnref n="6" /> whose overall evaluation was “strong reject,” states, among other things, that “[t]here is no parallel between orthographies, created by man and to be learnt/taught explicitly, on the one hand, and human language, which is precisely acquired by any child without explicit learning/teaching” (cf. also Daniels, 1991 for a similar view from—arguably—*within* grapholinguistics). Personally, I would give a ‘strong reject’ to this incredibly reductive and simplistic view. The second review, whose overall evaluation is “reject,” plainly reads: “This paper does not deal with linguistic matters, it only discusses graphic and orthographic points.” It is a slap in the face that general linguists’ horizons can be so utterly limited and that writing so often is not considered a ‘linguistic matter’. This is why we *need* grapholinguistic journals and conferences. However, at the same time—however frustrating the process may be—it is also paramount that research on writing becomes more visible also in outlets that are reserved for general linguistics and the fields that are uncontroversially believed to be a part of it. Writing is no marginal phenomenon, certainly not in our everyday lives but also not in many scientific disciplines, no matter how one puts it. Why, then, is studying it marginalized so much?

A further issue that an emerging grapholinguistics faces is that the diverse backgrounds brought to the table by different researchers are not always seen as a strength but instead lead to fragmentation and often unfruitful debates within the ‘discipline’. No one would deny that writing is a complex phenomenon and as such can be comprehensively treated only by a combination of multiple disciplines. In this vein, it is paramount to keep in mind that even though one (understandably) often thinks one’s own perspective is the most relevant one, other perspectives also have a *raison d’être*. Also, different perspectives usually do not exclude let alone negate one another. When a scholar carries out psycholinguistic research on writing, this does not mean that sociolinguistic research on writing is not also important. In turn, when one works on sociolinguistic questions, this does not mean descriptive structural questions are irrelevant. I have experienced this first-hand: much of my work, starting with my description of the materiality-oriented field of graphetics and moving on to attempts at defining comparative concepts such as *grapheme* and *allography*, can undeniably be interpreted as being influenced by the structuralist paradigm (although I would not call myself a structuralist). This has been criticized by sociolinguists despite the fact that nowhere in my work do I state that sociolinguistic research is unimportant or unnecessary (because I don’t, in fact, believe that it is unimportant). One can strive to descriptively systematize structural concepts and terminology that concern writing and still believe that,

<footnote n="6">6. Both reviews can be found at http://personal.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/CharFormBorrowing_Reviews.txt (October 21st, 2020).</footnote>
since writing is at its core a cultural technique and a way of communi-
cating, scribal practices of users in literate communities are of course a
form of social action and of the utmost importance. In other words, the
first of those questions does in no way devalue the second. Indeed, both
of them are indispensable and should be *combined* (sometimes unthink-
able for scholars deeply rooted in a particular paradigm) rather than
secluded from one another. Of course, through our academic socializa-
tion, we all have come to position ourselves in specific paradigms within
our respective disciplines. But when we all study the same phenomenon,
we need to make sure the walls of these paradigms and disciplines are
permeable.

Conferences like *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century* offer opportunities to gather and share with each other respective expertises and perspec- tives on writing. The question, now, is whether one wants to stop at being in awe for such different perspectives (usually displayed by expressing gratefulness to presenters right after they've finished pre- senting, e.g., by saying "Thank you for this interesting talk, I've never thought about it that way/I've never even considered this/this was com- pletely new to me") or rather wants to incorporate them into their own research—either through collaboration or through going the extra mile and immersing oneself in them. This is not to say that either of those alternatives is the 'right' one. But it is almost trivial to state that an interdisciplinary grapholinguistics can benefit more when we cease to (only) do 'our own thing'. This, of course, is much easier said than done. A challenge one must face in this vein is breaking through language bar- riers. A literal language barrier is constituted by the fact that valuable research on writing has been published in countless languages, includ- ing German, Russian, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and many more. In the past, this has led to unproductive discourses due to a lack of re- ception of non-English literature<sup>7</sup> (of which I myself am guilty, with the exception of German-language literature, which as an L1 reader of German I did of course consider). A metaphorical language barrier is erected by specific methods and terminology that are used in different disciplines. As concerns the future of grapholinguistics, researchers can contribute to improving this situation. Firstly, by publishing impor- tant findings (also) in English. I want to emphasize that this does *not* mean one should cease to publish in one's own language (as the domi- nance of English as an academic *lingua franca* is indeed to be scrutinized); yet, if one wants ideas to be adopted more globally (or even noticed in the first place), at least key points need to be made available and dis-

<footnote n="7">7. This leads to situations like Peter T. Daniels' rejection of a structural graphem(at)ics (Daniels, 1991), which, however, had been firmly and uncontroversially established in the German-language grapholinguistic realm (cf., for example, Günther, 1988).</footnote>
persed in English so that other scholars become aware of the original work in whatever language it was published (cf. for terminological discrepancies when publishing in English below). The second problem, unfortunately, is not as easily solved given that we cannot simply start to—put very crassly, apologies—‘dumb down’ research in order to make it more easily comprehensible to scholars foreign to our discipline. At least not if we strive to publish it in (conservative) outlets that are positioned firmly in the centers of respective disciplines, which of course in this day and age is vital for our careers. But then there’s *Written Language and Literacy*, for example, or *Scripta*, or *Visible Language*—journals that are openly interdisciplinary and that publish research that may require less specialist knowledge in a given area. Research that speaks to a broader audience.

As I mentioned above, if one is not already tenured (and maybe even then), devoting oneself to grapholinguistics entails a few risks. One of them is that by wanting to be part of many clubs, you’re not really part of any one of them. With one exception (see above), there are no grapholinguistic chairs (that I know of) and it is unlikely that this will drastically change in the near future. When it comes to job profiles, thus, no matter whether you are originally a linguist, psychologist, anthropologist, computer scientist, etc., when applying for academic positions, grapholinguistic research is not ‘worth’ the same as research tackling mainstream questions at the center of these disciplines. It is sometimes seen as icing on the cake—a special interest or even a ‘hobby’ (cf. Meletis, 2020a). It is none of those things. It is the study of one of if not *the* most important inventions and technologies of humankind that has implications for a myriad of fields. However, as long as this lack of institutionalization exists (which starts with the above-mentioned lack of writing-related classes), scholars who engage only or predominantly in grapholinguistics (such as yours truly) will remain exceptions (who will likely struggle to find suitable positions in academia).<fnref n="8" />

When looking at the last few paragraphs, it appears that musing about grapholinguistics tends to turn pessimistic fairly quickly, which raises the question: why even be(come) a grapholinguist? Well, let’s start with the most important (if of course subjective) point: it is an in-

<footnote n="8">8. At this point, I have to admit that when I was asked for career advice once (I was very surprised that someone would come to me for that), I suggested the person embrace their interest for writing *but* make sure their research is also firmly rooted in another field—such as psycholinguistics—and labeled primarily as such—i.e., psycholinguistic research—in order to ensure that the person has better chances of getting a job down the road. So I am guilty of acting in a way that contradicts most of what I state in this essay. But while I myself ‘took the risk’ of concentrating on the subject of writing and may not get a job at some point for this very reason, I did not want to be responsible for someone else not succeeding—even if that means there will never be many people who ‘just’ or primarily do grapholinguistics.</footnote>
credibly fascinating field. Ironically, some of the reasons for this were already named above—but as challenges of grapholinguistics: it is an utterly interdisciplinary and, technically, still nascent field. The former results in the fact that there are countless questions one can ask about writing from many different (combinations of) perspectives, and the latter means that many of those questions have actually not yet been studied. Grapholinguistics, to a large degree, is uncharted territory. For scholars who see research as a discovery process (probably most of them), this is a very attractive quality. Don't get me wrong: many aspects of writing have of course already been illuminated, including large portions of its history, many facets of its processing (i.e., reading and writing, although research to this day remains largely alphabetic, cf. Share, 2014), and even the structure of many major and some minor writing systems (cf., for example, the many chapters in Daniels and Bright, 1996 or Günther and Ludwig, 1994). What is missing in this impressive accumulation of research, however, is a guiding thread, which one could argue is the substantial equivalent (and simultaneously symptom) of the lack of institutionalization and the fact that everyone is doing 'their own thing'. A guiding thread would need to address questions such as: how is the history of writing connected to how humans process written words? How is processing affected by the structure of writing systems? Questions like these require the establishment of links between different disciplines (linguistics, psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences, computer sciences, etc.) and the consideration of diverse types of data. However, even within a single of the listed areas, links are often scarce: when linguistic descriptions of individual writing systems stand side by side and are not put into a larger context, for example, we are wasting the potential that these otherwise invaluable descriptions may have for comparison and the establishment of a unified conceptual and terminological framework that is, for this very reason, still lacking (cf. Meletis, 2019 for the specific example of the concept of *grapheme*). Since new research should be informed by past research and not everyone who works on a specific question has the time to excessively search for everything that has been said about a topic from different perspectives, what we also require but largely lack thus far is, at a meta-level, a historiography of grapholinguistics—which is also a fascinating area and one that I aim to attend to in the future.

Turning to existing grapholinguistic research to discover commonalities and systematize them in order to arrive at the above-mentioned guiding thread is in itself certainly not a 'flashy' endeavor. It is definitely not as innovative as carrying out your own research (and data collection) to answer your own (new) exciting questions. However, it is undeniably necessary in establishing a firm theoretical ground for grapholinguistics. Thus, not only innovation but also systematization is vital to the advancement of grapholinguistics (and any field, for that
matter). And it should be emphasized that when it is successful, systematization can actually enable innovation. Which leads back to my own grapholinguistic 'journey': At one point—arguably also due to my affinity for theory—I realized my biggest goal would be to systematize some of what was already there, i.e., to take a step back and see the bigger picture, to connect dots that were yet unconnected. Years ago, I had stumbed across the many compelling reviews semiotician W. C. Watt had written about important works on writing. In one of them (Watt, 1998) he assessed that there was no 'theory of writing' yet. In other words, he, too, observed that much great work had been done to study writing from many angles, but the fact that scholars from diverse disciplines did not seem to actively notice research from disciplines other than their own held back the development of what Watt termed a theory of writing—a theory that does not exist to this day. A central quote in Watt's (1998, p. 118) review further specifies what kind of theory he envisioned, "a theory that would explain [...] why each [...] writing system is the way it is, instead of some other way, and why all [...] writing systems have in common what they have in common." This quote obviously shifts the perspective from description—*how* writing systems are structured—to the additional and more elaborate perspective of explanation—*why* they are structured that way. This desideratum of an explanatory theory of writing became one of the driving forces behind my PhD thesis.

The second driving force was my encounter with an—at least nowadays—little-known linguistic theory, Naturalness Theory, which is actually a collection of subtheories, the main ones of which deal with phonology and morphology. As mentioned above, during my studies, I seized every opportunity to work on writing-related topics, so my thinking had already been tuned to 'what could/does this mean for writing?' when I encountered Naturalness Theory. And indeed, this theory appeared to offer so much of what was needed for a prospective theory of writing: it describes structures *and* asks how they affect processing while also considering sociocommunicative needs and practices. Also, what was immediately attractive was the explicit distinction of a universal level, a typological level, and a system-dependent level of analysis. Grapholinguistic research has been carried out predominantly at the system-specific level, partially also at the typological level (which, however, is not to be reduced to the assumption of writing system typologies, which have been proposed quite productively, cf. Joyce and Borgwaldt, 2011). The universal level, by contrast, has remained largely unstudied. All of these facets of Naturalness Theory, of course, do not sound unique to linguists, as they are characteristic of the functionalist paradigm (the most prominent approaches of which are, nowadays, usage-based approaches). Furthermore, what has been frequently scrutinized when it comes to the naturalist paradigm is the eponymous notion of 'naturalness' itself. On the surface, because of its evaluative na-
ture as an everyday term, it appears to be a potentially controversial concept, but in fact it is roughly the opposite of ‘markedness’ (as established in markedness theories) and, in usage-based terms, simply means ‘easy to process for users’. Thus, searching for what is ‘natural’ in writing— which is important for the discovery of universals of writing—does not contradict the fact that writing is, of course, an artifact, a *cultural* technique that differs in fundamental respects from language *per se*. It is rather a search for natural features *in* or *about* the cultural and artificial— features that were presumably introduced by prolonged use by humans (and their physiology, cognition, etc.).

In short, being familiarized with Naturalness Theory was the second piece of the puzzle that led me to the topic of my PhD thesis. Interestingly, two scholars (cf. Munske, 1994, Baroni, 2011) had already attempted to (partially) transfer naturalist concepts to writing. It was my goal to take this further. The first challenge in doing so, however, was that the original linguistic branches given the naturalist treatment—phonology and morphology—were already well-described when Natural Phonology (cf., exemplarily, Donegan and Stampe, 2009) and Natural Morphology (cf., exemplarily, Dressler, Mayerthaler, Panagl, and Wurzel, 1987), the respective main subbranches of Naturalness Theory, were conceived. The same cannot be said for grapholinguistics. What I have commented on at great length in various publications is that there is no unified descriptive-terminological as well as conceptual-framework for describing diverse writing systems. Such a framework would allow comparisons, but it appears that up until a while ago, scholars of writing adhered to a particularist view (cf. Meletis accepted) and thus believed the diversity of writing systems made the definition of grapholinguistic concepts (such as grapheme, allography, graphotactics) unfeasible.<fnref n="9" /> A general shift in perspective that could help in this respect is the one from narrow descriptive categories to looser comparative concepts (cf. Haspelmath, 2010). Graphemes of different writing systems, for example, have to share several core features which are thus inherent to the definition of the grapheme. When the grapheme is conceived of as a comparative concept, now, the details that go beyond these core features are not set in stone. This means, for example, that the obvious fact that Chinese and English graphemes differ in some respects ceases to be a counterargument against the feasibility of defin-

<footnote n="9">9. Indeed, when considering major works on writing systems such as Coulmas (2003), Rogers (2005), Gnanadesikan (2009), Sampson (2015), or Daniels (2018), it becomes obvious that they all juxtapose different systems (mostly by treating them in dedicated chapters). Thus, an individual, system-specific perspective clearly dominates, sometimes with contrastive undertones (i.e., alphabets differ from abjads in these respects: ...), whereas a comparative perspective is seldom adopted. Comparison, however, is needed for the definition of grapholinguistic concepts such as *grapheme*.</footnote>
ing a grapheme in the first place. The same can be argued for other grapholinguistic concepts. Being a theoretician at heart and seeking order, it is those descriptive comparative concepts that I first turned to before turning to explanation, which was my main goal. These concepts are in many ways preliminary and likely error-prone because at this stage, they have not incorporated all diverse types of writing systems. My personal aim was to at least take into account major representatives of each type of writing system (following Daniels' 2017 typology), which inevitably leaves many more marginal systems and exceptions unaccounted for. (Which—if you feel addressed at this point—is where you could step in.)

Explanation, then, is of course the even trickier part. According to Naturalness Theory (and many other functional theories), explanations can be attained with the help of external, extralinguistic evidence. In the case of writing, the various forms in which this evidence manifests itself are manifold and come from the most diverse fields, which is of course a challenge for a person who is most often only trained in one field (see above). Indeed, explaining why writing systems are the way they are—as Watt envisioned—is an incredibly ambitious endeavor. What is a prerequisite for it to be successful is knowing *how* one could go about in finding it out. Which is why, with my published PhD thesis *The Nature of Writing: A Theory of Grapholinguistics* (Meletis, 2020a), I am not offering a full-fledged theory of writing but a sketch of a theory of writing, a roadmap of steps necessary to arrive at a theory of writing and, in the process, I actually attempt to take some of those steps myself. This sketch will need to be extended, revised, and, most importantly, filled in with data from writing systems that have not yet been included, as mentioned above.

The basis for explanation is also the very core of usage-based approaches to linguistics: the structure of language and the use of language (and its users) interact. Accordingly, a truly comprehensive theory must consist of a descriptive part and an explanatory part. Considering both structure and use also accounts for the fact that grapholinguistics is interdisciplinary. Structure is mainly attended to by linguistics (or, more generally, semiotics), different facets of use—among them processing and communication—are studied by psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, among other fields. In short, a theory of writing has to treat writing *simultaneously* as a graphic (i.e., visual and/or tactile) semiotic system that relates to language, a form of data transmission that needs to be processed, a medium of communication, and a cultural technique. Of course, writing can also be studied from only one of those perspectives at a given time, but arguably, a theory of writing must be capable of accounting for all of its functions and 'identities', which leads to an assumption of four intricately interacting 'supercategories' of criteria (which I have termed 'fits', cf. Meletis, 2018; 2020a) that are of system-
atic, semiotic/descriptive, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic nature. These supercategories are generally useful in treating individual writing systems or comparing them with one another—but already from an explanatory rather than a purely descriptive perspective.

What I want to emphasize here without reiterating everything that is stated in my thesis is: a theory of writing does not need to be constructed from scratch. And Naturalness Theory is of course not the only theory that can be used as a basic framework for a theory of writing—indeed, a mixture of different theories might actually be the best solution. Transferring concepts from an existing linguistic theory to the study of writing is in a way innovative in that the fewest linguistic theories explicitly treat writing. In a nutshell, the dominant linguistic paradigms largely ignore writing, to this day. This means that grapholinguistics is not just considered ‘niche’ because the object of writing is seen as marginal but also because major theories have not even attempted to include it, which is a shame since writing can be studied with many of the useful tools that have been established in linguistics. For this reason it is not understandable (to me) that linguists often appear to know so little about writing or simply do not care about it: writing, in so many respects, is just like language—only in a microcosm (cf. Meletis, 2020a). This goes against the detrimental misconception (which was cited above) that there are no parallels between language and writing because the former is acquired naturally while the latter is taught. Indeed, the similarities between language and writing are actually unsurprising given that writing, as one of three modalities of language (the others being spoken language and sign(ed) language), is language.<fnref n="10" /> Also, languages are semiotic systems, as are writing systems. A crucial difference between them is that writing is a much more manageable phenomenon than language. Reasons for this include that there are fewer types of writing systems than language types and, of course, fewer writing systems in total than languages of the world. The history of writing is also much shorter than the history of language, its development much more reconstructable, since writing is not fleeting like speech and we have records of it that go back thousands of years. All of this makes writing an attractive object of research. And given that the majority of linguistic research relies on writing (cf. the *written language bias*, Linell, 1982), it is hypocritical for linguist(ic)s to continue excluding it. I want to go even further to show how fundamentally writing affects us (its users) as well as language: in my next grapholinguistic/sociolinguistic research project, I will investigate how the structure of different writing systems (such as Norwegian, Japanese, German) as well as specific sociolinguistic embeddings/circumstances

<footnote n="10">10. Take the concept of allography: its different types that are found in the world's writing systems behave exactly like allophony and allomorphy (cf. Meletis, 2020b), and no one would deny that phonology and morphology are parts of language.</footnote>
of literacy and scribal practices influence categories of normativity that help users evaluate as (in)correct, (in)appropriate, etc. not only writing but language in general. In a nutshell: whether there is an orthographic relativity to linguistic normativity (cf., for a similar question, the interesting-looking new book by Hye Pae, cf. Pae, 2020). What is clear already at this point—and few people would dispute this—is that in literate cultures, writing has been a game-changer. It is naïve to believe that comprehensive linguistic theories can afford to ignore it (cf., in this context, for the extreme psycholinguistic/cognitive position that units of language such as the phoneme, word, and sentence, are constituted by writing, Davidson, 2019).

While there used to be no grapholinguistic community (at least on a global scale, as there did exist local communities such as several writing-related groups in Germany in the 1980's), I am happy to observe that this has changed, and an international community is slowly starting to form itself—not least because of conferences like *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century* or the workshops of the *Association of Written Language and Literacy*. Since we are few (at least in comparison with communities in other linguistic subfields)—and this may sound overly emotive—we must stick together, also to exude some unity and coherence to outsiders of the field. Thus, I am urging everyone who is interested in writing from any given perspective or discipline to feel included in this community, regardless of whether one agrees with the label or not. In the end, it does not matter whether we call this endeavor ‘grapholinguistics’—it is our shared interest in writing that counts, and everyone who studies writing brings something to the table that potentially enriches the field. However, in order to work together, as outlined above, we must (be willing to) cross linguistic, theoretical, and methodological boundaries. Diversity is a strength, not an obstacle. And I am hoping for or—phrased more positively—looking forward to witnessing (and also participating in) many cross-disciplinary collaborations in the future.

A final note on terminology and openness: I am not saying we should not engage in fruitful discussions about certain terms—provided these discussions also bear on the conceptual level of the terms and are not purely terminological. Thus, it is justified to discuss whether there is such a thing as a grapheme while it is unproductive to fight (at least extensively) over how to call it when both arguing parties actually agree on the concept behind it. Since grapholinguistics subsumes so many fields, perspectives, and academic cultures and traditions, it is inevitable that some terms may not be accepted by everyone right from the start. But what I want to argue for here is that one should still be open to them. Let me provide two examples: the term *graphetics*, I was told, because of the *-etics* and the emics/etics dichotomy it connotes, will be dismissed by sociolinguists who believe that the material and formal appearance of writing also has functions (which of course it does), and it will be rejected to
such a degree that—and I was told this by someone standing at the thresh-
old of grapholinguistics and sociolinguistics—sociolinguists will not read
a book when it lists *graphetics* as a subject in its table of contents. This, how-
ever, would preclude them from finding out that the term may be defined
in a manner that includes functional aspects and accounts for all sorts of
questions that pertain to the materiality of writing, not just formal and
structural ones (as the term admittedly suggests). This is what I mean by
'openness', or the lack of it, to be precise. However, being open also means
being willing to rethink or abandon certain terms when other perspec-
tives or suggestions come along—such as when a term is proposed that is
demonstrably terminologically more inclusive than *graphetics*.

A second example of this concerns the term orthography. In anglo-
phone literature, it is largely used in a descriptive sense, sometimes
as a synonym of writing system. I have argued in some places (e.g.,
Meletis, 2018; 2020a) that orthography should not be used in this descrip-
tive sense as it more fittingly denotes the prescriptive regulation of a
writing system (and, thus, only part of a writing system, which means
the two terms are not synonymous), cf. Greek ὁρθός orthós 'right, true (also:
straight, erect)'. This is admittedly a hard pill to swallow for people who
have become accustomed to using orthography descriptively (a perspec-
tive for which other traditions have used terms like German Graphematik,
Italian grafematica, or French graphématique, which in English is of course
graphematics). I've been told repeatedly that this distinction between or-
thography and graphematics is Germano-centric as it only pertains to
German with its external orthographic regulator (the Council for German
Orthography) that curtails the theoretically possible variants provided by
the graphematics of the writing system. Indeed, the perspective I am
coming from is germanophone, and in German, the distinction between
Graphematik and Orthographie has a long tradition. This conceptual dis-
tinction, however, is by no means only useful or even necessary for
German. There are external orthographic regulations also for the writ-
ing systems of Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, French, Italian, Korean, etc.
Thus, it is actually the other way around: insisting that orthography is
a descriptive term is Anglo-centric. English is an 'outlier' writing sys-
tem not only when it comes to reading research (cf. Share, 2008) but also
when it comes to the self-regulating nature of its prevalent norms. What
I want to say is: no one wants to devalue or delegitimize these past uses
of orthography. Going forward, however, in the sense of a more inclusive
and comparative study of writing that brings together different schol-
arly traditions (such as the Anglo-American and German traditions), it
can be good to rethink certain practices, and the use of terminology—
again, if it entails conceptual consequences as well—is a part of that.<fnref n="11" />

<footnote n="11">11. Another example is the use of *logography* instead of *morphography*, often justified by the claim that one should not abandon established terms.</footnote>
And again: scholars interested in writing should of course engage in dis-
cussions and it is self-evident that they will not always agree on every-
thing. But it is important to ensure discussions have useful outcomes
and are not driven by vanity and lead to stagnation or fragmentation.
I have revised terms that I had coined myself (such as 'graphic word' in
Meletis, 2015) because I later found they were actually not fitting. Re-
search is never a done deal, especially so in a still-emerging field like
grapholinguistics—which occasionally means it is necessary to revise
opinions but also makes the field all the more exciting.

At the end of this essay, I want to cite Baroni’s (2016, p. 291) plea:
“Most linguists, when dealing with graphemics, written language, writ-
ing systems and orthography, feel the need to justify themselves. It is
about time to change this attitude and to stop feeling guilty about treat-
ing graphemics as part of linguistics.” In my opinion, there is no better
way of putting it. Personally, I have stopped justifying my interest in
writing. Thus, this essay is not to be read as a justification, but a reck-
oning of sorts, outlining why one shouldn’t (have to) justify. You should
try it too, it feels good. At the end of the day, it’s very simple: writing
is a fascinating and important subject and deserves to be studied for its
own sake—which is why I am happy to be a grapholinguist.

References

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<figure><img src="image_34.png" /></figure>
# Comparative Perspectives on the Study of Script Transfer, and the Origin of the Runic Script

Corinna Salomon

*Abstract.* The paper discusses a series of cases of script transfer with regard to the role played by script inventors in an effort to determine whether a premise held by certain scholars in runology, viz. that scripts are always created by individuals, is warrantable.

## 1. Preliminary Remarks

When setting out to research the derivation of the Runic script, the scholar soon finds that—even considering the appeal that is particular to questions about first beginnings and origins—the amount of literature dedicated to this problem exceeds expectations. Making this observation is in fact a commonplace of runology, serving as introduction to numerous studies concerned with the issue.

> Die frage nach dem alter und dem ursprung der runen ist so oft aufgeworfen und auf so viele verschiedene weisen beantwortet worden, daß man fast versucht sein könnte zu sagen, daß alle möglichen, denkbaren und undenkbaren ansichten zu worte gekommen sind. [...] Es ist eine sehr große literatur, die hier vorliegt; aber die Qualität steht leider im umgekehrten verhältnis zur quantität.¹

This paper represents a slightly reworked section of my doctoral thesis *Raetic and runes. On the North Italic theory of the origin of the Runic script* (University of Vienna 2018).

Corinna Salomon

<figure><img src="image_35.png" /></figure>

0000-0001-7257-6496

Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Wien, Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Wien, Austria

E-mail: corinna.salomon@univie.ac.at

1. “The question of the age and the origin of the runes has been asked so often and answered in so many different ways that one might almost be tempted to say that all possible, plausible and absurd views have been heard. [...] It is a very large literature that exists here; but unfortunately the quality stands in inverse relationship to the quantity.”

Y. Haralambous (Ed.), *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century 2020. Proceedings*

Grapholinguistics and Its Applications (ISSN: 2681-8566, e-ISSN: 2534-5192), Vol. 4. Fluxus Editions, Brest, 2021, pp. 143–199. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-graf-salo

ISBN: 978-2-9570549-6-1, e-ISBN: 978-2-9570549-8-5
The above quote is a representative example—the fact that it dates from 1887, being a passage in Ludvig Wimmer's *Die Runenschrift* (p. 11), which is widely considered to mark the beginning of modern Runic studies, should serve to convey an idea of the present state of affairs.

Curiously, the topic's popularity is due not so much to the pull of the challenge to find a plausible explanation at all, but to the abundance of possible solutions which suggest themselves. The difficulty lies not in constructing a (more or less) convincing argument, but, faced with a host of such, in comparing, assessing, and ultimately choosing that path through the thicket which one considers least fraught with obstacles—for, after all, few models yet have been conclusively disproved, and none was so compelling that somebody else did not prefer another (Williams, 1996, p. 121; Williams, 1997, p. 190). Arguments are adduced from all relevant fields—linguistics, archaeology, ancient history, grammatology, and their various subfields. Much hinges on the weighting of the different aspects, as the starting point often determines the result (Heizmann, 2010, p. 18); comparing and weighing the models against each other becomes an almost hopeless endeavour (Barnes, 1994, p. 12f).

To a certain extent, the possibility of a piece of data being assessed differently, its being considered relevant to the issue or not, is rooted in the methods proper to the humanities. Still, there are some recurring points in the discussion of the Runic origin-question which may be either cleared up or at least shown to involve matters which are not sufficiently well understood currently to be used to build theories on. For example, alphabet history or, generally, script history is regularly, yet usually somewhat vaguely referred to in the literature. There are a number of claims and premises which relate to historical and comparative grammatology—concerning for example the likelihood of source eclecticism in the development of new scripts, the validity of the argumentum ex silentio with regard to evidence gaps, or the role of orthographic features such as writing direction in script transfer—which have been employed as arguments in the discussion of Runic derivation, and I believe that something can be gained—if not in terms of concrete results, then at least methodologically—from a comparative investigation of these issues, to determine whether such claims are justified, whether they must be refuted, or whether their argumentative value is in fact nil. Systematic comparative studies of script transfer would benefit not only runology and other epigraphic/palaeographic fields which could profit from substantiated comparative and typological data, but also the study of historical grammatology per se.

This paper, like the presentation on which it is based, represents a small and selective contribution to one of these very large and general issues of script history: how do new scripts come into being? Specifically: do new scripts “develop” or are they “created”? Do they emerge through gradual diffusion, or are they the work of purposeful inven-
tors? The question is at the same time fundamental and elusive, and the answer (either of the two, or a more differentiated one) may seem obvious to many scholars. Still, unargued statements about how script is thought to be transferred to a new writing community is found in the— not only runological—literature, whereas I have not come across an explicit discussion of the matter, which I think the topic warrants. This paper cannot, of course, serve as a comprehensive study, but is intended as a stimulus for future research.

## 2. Runic Derivation

### 2.1. The Search for the Model

For general orientation, a short summary of the issues involved in the quest for the model of the Runic script is in order. The older fuþark, the oldest rune row as shown standardised in tab. 1, was used by speakers of Germanic languages between the 2nd and 8th century AD. It is an alphabetic script, and similarities to the Mediterranean alphabets are immediately evident, e.g., ♃—iota, ʃ—sigma, β—beta, ☞—lambda. Upon closer inspection, however, many of the individual letter shapes and grapheme-phoneme correspondences are quite surprising insofar as they find no clear models in the south, e.g., M/e/, P/w/, ◊/ŋ/. Runic equivalents of alphabetaria show that the order of the row is entirely different—hence the term fuþark instead of alphabet. The letter names given in tab. 1, though fully transmitted only in later mediaeval sources, can be quite reliably shown to go back to at least the 4th century—unlike the Mediterranean letter names, let alone the simple syllabic letter designations of Latin, the names of the runes are lexically meaningful in the language which the letters denote.

<table><caption>TABLE 1. The normalised letter forms of the older futhark together with their transliteration, (supposed) phonetic values, and the (sometimes only tentatively) reconstructed Proto-Germanic rune names (following Düwel, 2008, p. 198f)</caption><tr><td>Υ</td><td>f</td><td>f</td><td>*febu</td><td>h</td><td>b, x</td><td>*haglaz</td><td>↑</td><td>t</td><td>t</td><td>*tīwaz</td></tr><tr><td>Λ</td><td>u</td><td>ū</td><td>*ūruz</td><td>n</td><td>n</td><td>*naudiz</td><td>ß</td><td>b</td><td>b, b</td><td>*berkanan</td></tr><tr><td>Δ</td><td>þ</td><td>þ, ð</td><td>*þurisaz</td><td>l</td><td>i, ī</td><td>*īsaz</td><td>M</td><td>e</td><td>e, ē</td><td>*ehwaz</td></tr><tr><td>Γ</td><td>a</td><td>a, ā</td><td>*ansuz</td><td>ɔ</td><td>j</td><td>*jēran</td><td>M</td><td>m</td><td>m</td><td>*mannaz</td></tr><tr><td>Θ</td><td>r</td><td>r</td><td>*raidō</td><td>ʃ</td><td>ī</td><td>*īwaz</td><td>↑</td><td>l</td><td>l</td><td>*laguz</td></tr><tr><td>Λ</td><td>k</td><td>k</td><td>*kaunan?</td><td>ζ</td><td>p</td><td>*perþō?</td><td>◊</td><td>ŋ</td><td>ŋ</td><td>*ingwaz</td></tr><tr><td>Χ</td><td>g</td><td>g, g</td><td>*gebō</td><td>R</td><td>z/r</td><td>*algiz</td><td>Μ</td><td>d</td><td>d, d</td><td>*dagaz</td></tr><tr><td>Π</td><td>w</td><td>u</td><td>*wunjō?</td><td>?</td><td>s</td><td>*sōwilō</td><td>♀</td><td>o</td><td>o, ō</td><td>*ōþalan</td></tr></table>
Runic inscriptions appear somewhat abruptly on portable items in the second half of the 2nd century AD in southern Scandinavia (southern Norway, Denmark and northernmost Germany), seemingly well beyond the limits of literate Europe at the time. The earliest inscriptions are very short; where they are understandable, they encode the personal names of owners, writers and manufacturers (and sometimes, fancifully, also weapons); there is no evidence for public literacy in the earliest phase. There is some debate on which exact Germanic language (stage) is encoded in the first documents; it is accordingly hard to argue how well the older fuþark represents the phonemic system(s) of the language(s) it denotes. Graphically, the script is very uniform from the beginning; beyond a few minor differences in letter forms, there are no recognisable regional or chronological variants. The writing direction, on the other hand, is not fixed, and word separation is optional; apparently random retrograde runes, mirrored runes and various types of ligatures are common.

In some ways, the older fuþark is quite an ordinary specimen of Palaeo-European scripts—a group which, after all, boasts members like the Iberian script and Ogam—but the fact of its existence remains baffling in many respects. The plethora of contributions to the question of how the runes came to be is usually collected in three camps according to whether the (primary) model is the Latin, the Greek, or a North Italic alphabet, respectively. Each of these camps includes a large number of widely different theories which involve different geographical, diachronic or stylistic alphabet variants and emphasise different aspects—formal, grammatological, linguistic, archaeological, historical, cultural—of the borrowing, and have correspondingly different virtues and shortcomings. As of today, no single attested Mediterranean alphabet has been identified which provides everything a model for the runes ought to provide, namely:

- models for all Runic graphemes and motivation for their sound values,

- explanations for the deviant order and the letter names,

- paradigms for the epigraphic culture (writing conventions and text types), and

- a plausible historical context for a borrowing.

While the recent decades have seen, to some extent, a shift away from formal to historical-archaeological considerations, it is the letter forms and values which were and are the focus of theories of Runic origin. Since the work of Jacob Bredsdorff (1822), the scientific community has been widely agreed that the runes are not derived directly from the Phoenician alphabet; the claim that they represent a Germanic or even Indo-European proto-script has also rather lost in appeal. The many suggestions offered to this day work with a handful of potential model
alphabets which are derived from each other and are consequently so
similar in many respects that the distinction between genetical and ty-
pological developments is as difficult as the identification of discrete ge-
ographical and diachronic variants (Wimmer, 1887, p. 20; Mees, 1999,
p. 149). The debate moves within such a narrow field that the numer-
ous possibilities for formal derivations are hard to prefer to each other—
any rune can be argued to correspond to a daunting number of letters
from various northern Mediterranean alphabets and alphabet variants.
Many derivations proposed by scholars have been criticised and/or re-
jected for what was considered an inadequate or even principally flawed
handling of the establishment of graphic or systematic relationships be-
tween model letters and runes. The demand for a consistent approach
which respects both character shapes and grapheme-phoneme relation-
ships, and for the avoidance of ad-hoc explanations, is found regularly
in the runological literature—again, it can be traced back to Wimmer
(1887):

da ich als hauptgrundsatz für die ableitung zweier alphabete von ein-
ander die forderung aufstelle, dafs die zeichen einander sowohl inform
wie bedeutung entsprechen müssen, wofern man nicht, wo dies in der
einen oder andern richtung nicht der fall ist, ganz evident die gründe der ab-
weichungen nachweisen kann. Sonst wird man leicht zu den willkürlichsten
und unbegreiflichsten zusammenstellungen verleitet (1887, S. 120).<fnref n="2" />

How hard it is to meet this requirement was demonstrated by Wim-
mer himself. The initial impact of his seminal work was probably to no
little extent owed to the favourable impression that his tidy presentation
of well and elaborately argued derivations of all the runes from the let-
ters of the Classical Latin alphabet made in comparison to earlier efforts.
In hindsight, Wimmer heads a long and illustrious line of scholars whose
theories involve a few plausible or even seemingly obvious correspon-
dences and explanations beside a considerable number of motivations
for discrepancies that range from the disputable to the highly improba-
ble. It is often attempted to support individual derivations by referring
to similar, but unrelated developments in other alphabets, by positing
principles of rune formation which are then used to circularly moti-
vate the forms they were inferred from, and/or by making unsubstan-
tiated assumptions about the circumstances of the derivations. Ad-hoc
explanations of sound values which were switched, adapted or misinter-
preted, and letters which were inverted, mirrored, doubled and confused

<footnote n="2">2. ‘since I posit as *main principle* for the derivation of two alphabets from each other the requirement that the characters must correspond to each other *in form as well as in meaning*, unless one can, where this is not the case in one or the other direction, demonstrate evidently the reasons for the deviation. Otherwise one is tempted to the most arbitrary and incomprehensible combinations’.</footnote>