disclose their nature. The terms (correspondence, equality, resemblance, congruence, equivalence, identity, analogy) that are used to interpret them are numerous, each reflecting subtle aspects of form-meaning association (mapping, correlation).

The definitions/mechanisms of non-arbitrary relationships vary depending on different types of linguistic signs. In onomatopoeia, non-arbitrary relationships are defined as the relations of low/high-order similarity or resemblance and structural similarity between form and meaning (Winter, Perlman, Perry, and Lupyan, 2017); (Dingemanse et al., 2015). In the former case, physical sensoriperceptual properties of the referent (usually emitted sounds) are imitated in the perceptual/graphical properties of the word form (sounds/graphemes) and are associated with some features of the lexical meaning of the word. The imitation of sensory properties refers to the low-order similarity where the attributes of the objects are compared. In the latter case, there is a relational similarity in the elements of structure (high-order similarity), where the relations between objects are compared, e.g., the sequential order of the events imitates the word order in a sentence (Haiman, 1985).

In sound symbolism, we also deal with the high-order similarity where the properties of abstract 'referents' are associated with the elements of a word form, and where the human—cognitive, motor, spatial, emotional, etc. experiences are symbolized by sounds. E.g., "high tones, vowels with high second formants (notably /i/), and high-frequency consonants are associated with high-frequency sounds, small size, sharpness, and rapid movement; low tones, vowels with low second formants (notably /u/), and low-frequency consonants are associated with low-frequency sounds, large size, and heavy, slow movements" (Hinton, Nichols, and Ohala, 1994, p. 10). According to Winter, Perlman, Perry, and Lupyan (2017), words referring to sensory domains (sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell) are more iconic than the words with abstract meanings. The differences between onomatopoeia/sound symbolism are reflected in the two types of iconicity—absolute or primary/relational or secondary correspondingly.

In phonaesthemes, the relations of systematicity are brought to the fore: they possess an initial cluster of phonemes which occurs regularly within a set of words. E.g., the words starting with bl-, sn-, gl-, pr-, etc. have some similarity of meaning, referring to such semantic classes as 'audible', 'perceptible', 'moving', etc. (Lvova, 2005). In this case, we are not concerned with a direct relationship between form and meaning but with a systematic correspondence between them. Such "regular mapping between aspects of form and function" (Dingemanse et al., 2015) features distributional regularities in different languages. Various scholars measuring sound/meaning similarity distance (Shillcock, Kirby, McDonald, and Brew, 2001); (Abramova and Fernández, 2016)
have arrived at the conclusion about the ubiquitous character of this
phenomenon.

Most linguists study iconic signs within the framework of phono-
logical iconicity. Our aim was to show the role and place of referen-
tial meanings in non-arbitrary form-meaning relationships in the his-
tory of the Old English language. Indeed, iconicity plays an impor-
tant role in language development: according to Perniss and Vigliocco
(2014), it “bridges between” language and human experiences and “sup-
port *referentiality*” (the ability of speakers to label objects and events in
the processes of nomination) and “displacement” (the ability of linguis-
tic signs to stand for the referents).

Within the course of language development iconicity erodes: a good
example of erosion is the process of grammaticalization where the forms
with more concrete meanings are superseded with the forms with more
abstract meanings. E.g., the Old English verbs of existence *beon/wesan*
used to nominate more concrete meanings of ‘growth’, ‘biding’, and
‘dwelling’ clearly capturing some iconic properties relevant for the
speakers. In the course of time these meanings semantically eroded and
later were replaced by the more abstract grammatical meaning of ‘exist-
tence’. One more example of the erosion of iconicity is the language vo-
cabulary: “with vocabulary growth, representational spaces comprising
forms and meanings become more densely populated, thereby increas-
ing the possibilities of confusion and ambiguity in the spoken forms of
words, providing a selective pressure towards more arbitrary, more dis-
criminable forms” (Dingemanse et al., 2015).

5. Data and Methodology

Our research is performed on the basis of the Old English lexicon. Com-
putational analysis in the field of diachronic linguistics is based on
such data preprocessing as lemmatization, stemming, POS and seman-
tic tagging, morphological and syntactic markup. Old English is a low-
resource language. The limitation of Old English textual data and the
absence of finished implementations for older languages preprocessing
constitute considerable challenge. Due to the broad dialectal variation
in Old English, there is a large number of orthographic variants, which
makes it difficult to perform lemmatization, stemming and POS tagging
(the existing Python implementations provide inaccurate results). Mor-
phological and syntactic markup is available only for a small number of
texts. Thus, the scope of our study was narrowed, and it was decided
to focus on the analysis of A Thesaurus of Old English,<fnref n="5" /> with the appli-

<footnote n="5">5. http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/</footnote>
cation of statistical methods of the research. A Thesaurus is provided
under the license.

The data comprise the lexemes from A Thesaurus sharing the initial consonantal graphemes (phonemes) <w>, 
, <h>, and <p>. The lexemes with the initial graphemes <w>, 
, <h> are the most frequent ones while the lexemes with the initial <p>, on the contrary, are the least frequent. After processing, the dataset for the analysis comprised the lexemes with four onsets: <w> (3359 words), 
 (4586 words), <h> (5210 words), and <p> (542 words) excluding entries with the compound lexemes written separately or with a hyphen (13,697 words in total). In A Thesaurus lexical meanings of Old English words are arranged into 18 conceptually organized semantic categories. The categories are: 1. The Physical World, 2. Life and Death, 3. Matter and Measurement, 4. Material Needs, 5. Existence, 6. Mental Faculties, 7. Opinion, 8. Emotion, 9. Language and Communication, 10. Possession, 11. Action and Utility, 12. Social interaction, 13. Peace and War, 14. Law and Order, 15. Property, 16. Religion, 17. Work, 18. Leisure. A certain semantic category is ascribed to each word, e.g., *wæp* 'a ford' is given under the category 5. 'Existence'. We hypothesize that there might be some non-random distribution of semantic categories over the lexemes sharing initial graphemes.

Statistical methods are widely used in linguistic research. For the
analysis of the distribution the most commonly used one is Pearson's
Chi-square, in particular the Chi-square test and the coefficient of con-
tingency. Despite frequent critical remarks on the application of Pear-
son's Chi-square in linguistics we consider it to be appropriate and rea-
sonable for our dataset though with certain assumptions. Pearson's Chi-
square attempts at making a conclusion whether a distribution observed
is purely accidental, or whether it reflects a certain regularity. This sta-
tistical test is applied to a contingency table made up of the element
frequency in the sampling unit to be compared with the total number of
elements in this unit. The null hypothesis tested is that the difference
between the element frequency is the result of random variations. The
implementation of Pearson's Chi-square statistics is available in a num-
ber of software frequently used in corpus linguistics such as WordSmith
Tools and AntConc but in our case the data preprocessing and Pearson's
Chi-square statistics were performed within Python realization.

6. Form-Meaning Hypothesis in a Thesaurus of Old English

For the analysis we calculated the frequency of lexemes starting with
<w>, 
, <h>, and <p> graphemes in every semantic category of A
Thesaurus of Old English. The results are presented in Table 1.
<table><caption>TABLE 1. The distribution of the initial graphemes <w>, 
, <p>, <h> in semantic categories</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>&lt;w&gt;</th><th>&lt;s&gt;</th><th>&lt;h&gt;</th><th>&lt;p&gt;</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>The Physical World</td><td>193</td><td>335</td><td>247</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>Life and Death</td><td>553</td><td>809</td><td>932</td><td>109</td></tr><tr><td>Matter and Measurement</td><td>164</td><td>327</td><td>261</td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>Material Needs</td><td>283</td><td>478</td><td>514</td><td>76</td></tr><tr><td>Existence</td><td>347</td><td>707</td><td>658</td><td>53</td></tr><tr><td>Mental Faculties</td><td>216</td><td>264</td><td>222</td><td>15</td></tr><tr><td>Opinion</td><td>146</td><td>64</td><td>167</td><td>26</td></tr><tr><td>Emotion</td><td>236</td><td>202</td><td>307</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Language and Communication</td><td>118</td><td>157</td><td>69</td><td>14</td></tr><tr><td>Possession</td><td>17</td><td>34</td><td>67</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>Action and Utility</td><td>135</td><td>150</td><td>214</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>Social interaction</td><td>304</td><td>246</td><td>318</td><td>14</td></tr><tr><td>Peace and War</td><td>126</td><td>185</td><td>234</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Law and Order</td><td>114</td><td>106</td><td>105</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>Property</td><td>75</td><td>64</td><td>66</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>Religion</td><td>228</td><td>275</td><td>698</td><td>75</td></tr><tr><td>Work</td><td>66</td><td>113</td><td>88</td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>Leisure</td><td>38</td><td>70</td><td>43</td><td>34</td></tr></tbody></table>

Table 1 presents a contingency table of two categorical variables—the semantic category and the initial grapheme of the word. To check if the semantic categories are distributed among the lexemes with identical initial graphemes non-randomly, we applied the Chi-square test. The Chi-square statistics is commonly used for testing relationships between categorical variables. The Chi-square test measures the ratio of difference between the expected frequencies and the observed frequencies in one or more categories of a contingency table, which enables to estimate the relationship between the variables. The null hypothesis of the Chi-square test is that the categorical variables are statistically independent. The null hypothesis will be recognized when the observed frequencies are less than the expected counts. In cases where the observed frequencies are greater than theoretically expected ones, the relationships between variables are statistically significant and present evidence for correspondence between them. The formula for the Chi-square test is:

$$ \chi_c^2 = \sum_i \frac{(O_i - E_i)^2}{E_i}, $$

where $c$ = degrees of freedom, $O$ = observed value(s), $E$ = expected value(s).
The application of the Chi-square test to the resulting table shows the following statistics: $\chi^2 = 765.67, p = 3.637 \times 10^{-128}, df = 51$. The critical value of the Chi-square statistics with $50 < df < 55$ varies from 67.51 up to 86.66 and more. Thus, the resulting statistics can be considered an example of non-random variation with the significant p-value. Thereby, we can conclude that the null hypothesis of the independence of variables can be rejected.

Statistics also offers to analyze the cell-wise contributions to the Chi-square to see where the evidence for the dependence is coming from. The contribution to the Chi-square quantifies the individual category contributions, i.e., how much of the total the Chi-square statistic is attributable to each category difference between observed and expected values. The contribution to the Chi-square is found by taking the squared difference between the observed count and the expected count then dividing by the expected count. The results of the contributions to the Chi-square are presented in Table 2. Larger values indicate a more substantial contribution to the overall Chi-square statistics.

<table><caption>TABLE 2. Contributions to the Chi Square for Old English initial <w>, 
, <p>, <h> in 18 semantic categories</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>&lt;w&gt;</th><th>&lt;s&gt;</th><th>&lt;h&gt;</th><th>&lt;p&gt;</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>The Physical World</td><td>0.05</td><td>16.84</td><td>10.79</td><td>1.41</td></tr><tr><td>Life and Death</td><td>2.23</td><td>0.02</td><td>0.35</td><td>2.01</td></tr><tr><td>Matter and Measurement</td><td>3.57</td><td>17.57</td><td>3.87</td><td>1.93</td></tr><tr><td>Material Needs</td><td>7.04</td><td>1.46</td><td>0.00</td><td>9.46</td></tr><tr><td>Existence</td><td>17.02</td><td>22.80</td><td>0.26</td><td>4.09</td></tr><tr><td>Mental Faculties</td><td>9.18</td><td>2.39</td><td>9.43</td><td>6.32</td></tr><tr><td>Opinion</td><td>22.52</td><td>37.28</td><td>1.23</td><td>6.31</td></tr><tr><td>Emotion</td><td>14.12</td><td>10.08</td><td>1.42</td><td>14.58</td></tr><tr><td>Language and Communication</td><td>10.39</td><td>11.51</td><td>33.13</td><td>0.00</td></tr><tr><td>Possession</td><td>5.00</td><td>0.81</td><td>10.67</td><td>3.75</td></tr><tr><td>Action and Utility</td><td>0.60</td><td>2.92</td><td>1.68</td><td>0.95</td></tr><tr><td>Social interaction</td><td>35.57</td><td>8.23</td><td>0.91</td><td>12.54</td></tr><tr><td>Peace and War</td><td>0.58</td><td>0.00</td><td>2.94</td><td>12.93</td></tr><tr><td>Law and Order</td><td>12.35</td><td>0.34</td><td>3.95</td><td>0.80</td></tr><tr><td>Property</td><td>9.16</td><td>0.96</td><td>3.18</td><td>0.70</td></tr><tr><td>Religion</td><td>23.04</td><td>54.23</td><td>93.18</td><td>11.84</td></tr><tr><td>Work</td><td>0.52</td><td>2.16</td><td>5.08</td><td>20.25</td></tr><tr><td>Leisure</td><td>1.20</td><td>1.05</td><td>10.64</td><td>97.10</td></tr></tbody></table>

To estimate the relationship of every initial grapheme to certain semantic category we computed the Chi-square test for alternative dis-
tribution contingency 2 × 2 tables compiled on the basis of Table 1 as follows:

<table><caption>TABLE 3. The alternative distribution contingency table</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>religion</th><th>other semantic categories</th><th>total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>&lt;p&gt;</td><td>75</td><td>467</td><td>542</td></tr><tr><td>other initials</td><td>1,201</td><td>11,954</td><td>13,155</td></tr><tr><td>total</td><td>1,276</td><td>12,421</td><td>13,697</td></tr></tbody></table>

In cases where the association between two variables can be statistically significant (the Chi-square and p-value results), the strength of this association can be very small. To decide whether the relationship between two categorical variables is important, the coefficient of contingency (Phi (or $\phi$)) is computed. The Phi coefficient measures how closely the observations in rows and columns are associated with each other. The formula for the Phi coefficient is $\phi = \sqrt{\frac{\chi^2}{n}}$, where n is the total number of observations.

Table 4 provides the Chi-square, p-value and Phi coefficient results only for the cases where the observed data exceed the expected figures. The authors reason such data elimination by focusing on positive correlation between the variables. The critical value of the Chi-square statistics with df = 1 is 3.84. The range of Phi values from 0.05 to 0.1 are considered to estimate moderate positive relationships.

The results of the Chi-square together with the coefficient of contingency and the contributions to the Chi-square for the words with the initial graphemes <w>, 
, <p>, <h> turn out to be different for certain semantic categories. This testifies to the idea of the correspondence between the initial grapheme of the word and its semantics. The resulting values allow the authors to reject the null hypothesis as they manifest non-arbitrary association between the words starting with different onsets and semantic categories:

<w> 'Social interaction' (*wealdan* 'to rule', *werod* 'assembly'), 'Opinion' (*wlanc* 'arrogant', *wlitig* 'fair, noble'), 'Emotion' (*weorc* 'suffering', *wynsum* 'joyful'), 'Law and Order', 'Language and Communication', 'Mental Faculties', 'Property'.


 'Existence' (*sālnes* 'a time of silence', *samod* 'without a break'), 'Matter and Measurement' (*samen* 'together', *sid* 'large'), 'The Physical World' (*seolfor* 'silver', *sicel* 'small stream').

<h> 'Religion' (*halig* 'holy', *hals* 'salvation'), 'Possession' (*habban* 'to possess'), 'Peace and War'.
<table><caption>TABLE 4. Chi Square p-value and Phi coefficient data for Old English initials <w>, 
, <p>, <h> in 18 semantic categories</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>&lt;w&gt;<br>chi²,<br>p-value, φ</th><th>&lt;s&gt;<br>chi²,<br>p-value, φ</th><th>&lt;h&gt;<br>chi²,<br>p-value, φ</th><th>&lt;p&gt;<br>chi²,<br>p-value, φ</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>The Physical World</td><td>26.87<br>2.17E-7<br>0.04</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Life and Death</td><td>0.045<br>0.83<br>0.002</td><td>0.69<br>0.4<br>0.007</td><td>2.57<br>0.1<br>0.01</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Matter and Measurement</td><td>27.99<br>1.22E-7<br>0.05</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Material Needs</td><td>2.43<br>0.12<br>0.01</td><td>4.45E-5<br>0.99<br>5.70E-5</td><td>10.98<br>0.0009<br>0.03</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Existence</td><td>39.33<br>3.59E-10<br>0.05</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Mental Faculties</td><td>12.83<br>0.0003<br>0.03</td><td>3.79<br>0.052<br>0.02</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Opinion</td><td>30.73<br>2.96E-8<br>0.05 / 5%</td><td>2.04<br>0.15<br>0.01</td><td>6.8<br>0.009<br>0.02</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Emotion</td><td>19.79<br>8.63E-6<br>0.04</td><td>2.43<br>0.12<br>0.01</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Language and Communication</td><td>14.14<br>0.0001<br>0.03</td><td>17.76<br>2.51E-5<br>0.04</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Possession</td><td></td><td></td><td>17.74<br>2.53E-5<br>0.04</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Action and Utility</td><td>0.83<br>0.36<br>0.008</td><td></td><td>2.8<br>0.09<br>0.01</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Social interaction</td><td>50.36<br>1.28E-12<br>0.06</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Peace and War</td><td></td><td>0.006<br>0.94<br>0.0007</td><td>4.94<br>0.03<br>0.02</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Law and Order</td><td>16.76<br>4.23E-5<br>0.03</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Property</td><td>12.33<br>0.0004<br>0.03</td><td></td><td></td><td>0.74<br>0.39<br>0.007</td></tr><tr><td>Religion</td><td></td><td></td><td>165.79<br>6.13E-38<br>0.11</td><td>13.66<br>0.0002<br>0.03</td></tr><tr><td>Work</td><td></td><td>3.31<br>0.069<br>0.02</td><td></td><td>21.59<br>3.37E-6<br>0.04</td></tr><tr><td>Leisure</td><td></td><td>1.6<br>0.2<br>0.01</td><td></td><td>102.62<br>4.05E-24<br>0.08</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p> ‘Leisure’ (*pipe* ‘a flute’, *plega* ‘play’, ‘sport’), ‘Work’ (*pāl* ‘a spade’, *pinn* ‘nail’), ‘Religion’ (*preost* ‘a priest’, *postol* ‘an apostle’), ‘Material Needs’, ‘Opinion’.

7. Conclusion

In our study we have made an attempt to test the form-meaning hypoth-
esis in earlier stages of language. The outline of our research sketches
the entire lexicon, not the localized phonaesthemic patterns which are
mostly examined in the related studies. To explore such patterns the au-
thors apply the methods of historical semantics for thorough linguistic
analysis without reference to computational tools.

We analyzed the methods of computational linguistics and realized
that in relation to older languages not all of them are suitable. We have
decided to employ statistical methods for our research. Although there
is a lot of criticism about the use of statistical methods in linguistics,
the results are worth considering as the application of these methods
is promising for identifying the regularities in language development.
We computed the relationship of Old English words sharing consonantal
initial graphemes (phonemes) and their conceptual (referential) mean-
ings in the lexicon. We found out that there is a certain association
between an initial grapheme and semantic category to which the word
sharing this grapheme belongs. We have revealed a regularity that the
distribution of semantic categories among the words starting with one
initial grapheme differs from the distribution of semantic categories
among the words starting with the other onsets. We assume that this
regularity may take place by chance, but it is highly likely to be based
on non-arbitrary form-meaning relations. This patterning may be ran-
dom, but it may as well be determined by the iconic coding in language.

For a while, the form-meaning hypothesis was tested only on four
initial graphemes in the Old English lexicon. We expect that for a larger
number of graphemes the results would be different. In the future, we
plan to expand the dataset with more initial graphemes and to undertake
a full-scale research. Further explorations into the topic can be contin-
ued in the sphere of semiographemics since form-meaning relationships
can be also traced in other semiotic modelling systems (symbolic writ-
ings and art) with specific implications for form-meaning hypothesis
(Lotman, 2011).
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# Graphemic Complexity for the
New Romance Phonemes in Italian

## Some Reflections

Stefano Presutti

*Abstract.* The grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) is considered the essential factor to classify the spelling consistency of world languages that also use a writing system to communicate. This paper focuses on cases of grapho-phonological inconsistency in a shallow writing system such as Italian. Particularly, this is an in-depth study of new Romance grapheme-phoneme correspondence complexity. This study attempts to explain why this inconsistency in Italian specifically involves these seven grapho-phonemes and does so by examining similar characteristics related to their historical development, which include some unsuccessful spelling reforms, phonological markedness, and language acquisition processes. In doing so, this paper examines the phenomenon of grapheme-phoneme correspondence consistency through original perspectives which therein provide a more complete picture of the possible motivations that led to these inconsistencies. The findings show that the surviving complexity related to these seven target consonants could indicate the effort that natives and non-natives should make to speak and write the standard language properly. Thus, at the grapho-phonological level, the etymological and national identity creation and preservation processes could be more important than the need to improve the language consistency.

## 1. Introduction

The correspondence between graphemes and phonemes of a language system is used as the main unit to classify the spelling consistency of all written languages. Particularly, by virtue of the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (Frost, Katz, and Bentin, 1987; Katz and Frost, 1992), world languages have been classified in the last few decades according to their grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) consistency degree along an axis with two extremes: orthographic depth and transparency.

Much of the research regarding GPC consistency has focused largely on English, a strong example of a language with high orthographic

<figure><img src="image_39.png" /></figure>
depth, to the detriment of other languages (Besse, 2007; Share, 2008; Ziegler, 2018). One of the main innovative elements of this study concerns the target language. Instead of analysing the grapho-phonological consistency of a deep writing system, and focusing instead on that of Italian, this paper has studied an inconsistent grapheme-phoneme correspondence present in a highly transparent writing system.

I sought to understand why Italian has a GPC inconsistency with specific new Romance phonemes, which were the hindmost institutionalized elements within the Italian phonological system, and why this has persisted as one of the primary unsolved problems of correspondence between sound and spelling.

Research on graphemic complexity has consistently preferred a synchronous study of the target language. In contrast, this paper has highlighted the grapheme-phoneme correspondence consistency through different perspectives, with the main goal of understanding what possible linguistic factors may affect the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. Firstly, this study is one of the first attempts to clarify the history of target language grapho-phonemes in order to understand why there is GPC inconsistency in Italian despite its shallow orthography and the several attempted spelling reforms that have been made over time. Secondly, I have identified some compelling similarities between the seven inconsistent grapho-phonemes while considering their markedness degree, their diachronic period of sociopolitical acceptance into the grapho-phonological system, and their acquisition times in mother tongue (L1) and non-native (L2) contexts.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: in order to lay a foundation for the discussion of grapheme-phoneme correspondence consistency, especially in Italian, I discuss some grapho-phonological preliminaries. Following that, I describe the main characteristics of Italian graphematics, and then discuss how the grapho-phonological system has developed over time, particularly with regard to the seven new Romance target grapho-phonemes. I also show how several attempted spelling reforms failed. Moreover, I highlight similarities concerning the phonological markedness, the diachronic institutionalization, and the L1 and L2 learning processes. I distinctly describe the main feature of one of the grapho-phoneme targets: the palatal lateral approximant in Italian. The paper closes with a brief conclusion in which I summarise the findings and offer some suggestions for possible future proposals.

## 2. The GPC Consistency

In order to delve deep into one of the main Italian GPC inconsistencies, it is essential to clarify the main theoretical terms used in this paper— namely, the *spelling-sound consistency* and *orthographic depth*.
The orthographic consistency of a language is characterized by a
more or less exact correspondence of the sublexical units between
the phonological and the graphematic systems. Orthographic consis-
tency does not exclusively concern the GPC (grapheme-phoneme cor-
respondence) or the PGC (phoneme-grapheme correspondence), but
additionally the larger parts of a word, such as syllable, coda, and
rhyme. Consistency—or transparency—can be measured in both direc-
tions: from sound to spelling or from spelling to sound. In addition, the
concept of consistency can be partially complemented by that of ortho-
graphic depth. As Richlan recently identified, the orthographic depth
is “the complexity, consistency, or transparency of grapheme-phoneme
correspondences in written alphabetic language” (Richlan, 2014, p. 1).
Therefore, this term only refers to the minimal units of language.

This concept has been mentioned in an array of research throughout
the 1980s and early 1990s (Lukatela, Popadić, Ognjenović, and Turvey,
1980; Liberman, Liberman, Mattingly, and Shankweiler, 1980; Katz and
Feldman, 1981; I. Y. Liberman, 1989; A. M. Liberman, 1992; Seidenberg,
1992), but it acquires a more definitive value when referencing the reli-
ability of spoken and written language correspondences, apropos of the
aforementioned Orthographic Depth Hypothesis. Notably, a shallow or
transparent orthography will have a more direct spelling-sound corre-
spondence, as is the case with Serbo-Croatian, while a deep orthography
will exhibit a less direct one-to-one single grapheme-phoneme corre-
spondence, as is the case with English (Katz and Frost, 1992).<fnref n="1" /> How-
ever, the degree of transparency is often variable, even within the same
language. Because of this, some languages, such as Spanish and Italian,
have a high consistency from spelling to phonology, but also a lower
consistency in the opposite direction (cf. for Spanish Landerl, 2006; for
Italian Neef and Balestra, 2011).<fnref n="2" />

3. Characteristics of Italian Writing System

I describe herein the main features of the target language of this study and, more specifically, the new grapho-phonemes introduced later in Italian.

<footnote n="1">1. It should be noted, however, that the measure of the complexity of the relationship between the orthographic and phonological systems of a language remains particularly complex and does not constitute a universal value. Indeed, each modality for classifying orthographic depth is based on a partial choice of rules to be considered (cf. Schmalz, Marinus, Coltheart, and Castles, 2015; Ziegler, 2018).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. As a general rule, we can say that when there is a difference in consistency between spelling and sound, phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence tends to be less transparent than grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence (Cook and Bassetti, 2005, pp. 9–10).</footnote>
When considering the primary rules of Italian GPC and comparing them to those of other European languages (cf. Table 1), Italian emerges as being more transparent than others, such as English or French, because it has fewer rules for phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Thus, Italian has a shallow writing system to the extent that it is mostly written as it is pronounced (Maraschio, 1993).

<table><caption>TABLE 1. Measures of complexity and unpredictability for Dutch, English, French, German and Italian (Schmalz, Marinus, Coltheart, and Castles, 2015)<fnref n="3" /></caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Dutch</th><th>English</th><th>French</th><th>German</th><th>Italian</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Total number of rules</td><td>104</td><td>226</td><td>340</td><td>130</td><td>59</td></tr><tr><td>Single-letter rules</td><td>51<br>(49.0%)</td><td>38<br>(16.9%)</td><td>46<br>(13.5%)</td><td>44<br>(33.8%)</td><td>19<br>(32.2%)</td></tr><tr><td>Multi-letter rules</td><td>42<br>(40.4%)</td><td>161<br>(71.2%)</td><td>218<br>(64.1%)</td><td>55<br>(42.3%)</td><td>8<br>(13.6%)</td></tr><tr><td>Context-sensitive rules</td><td>11<br>(10.6%)</td><td>27<br>(11.9%)</td><td>76<br>(22.4%)</td><td>31<br>(23.8%)</td><td>32<br>(54.2%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

As illustrated in Table 2, there are some cases in contemporary Italian in which a phoneme is represented by a complex grapheme, wherein a grapheme changes depending on the context. Additionally, a few complex correspondence rules with some graphemes also exist. In each of these circumstances, with the exception of double consonants (in the fifth line) and vowel ortho-epic characteristics (in the third line), the same graphic signs are always used: <g> (also used for <gl> and <gn>), <z>, 
, <c>, and the diacritical letter <i>. The following paragraph shows how all of them have been adopted to represent the new Romance phonemes introduced in the Italian phonological system.

## 3.1. Complex Graphemes of New Romance Phonemes

The elements institutionalized last in the Italian grapho-phonological system consist of seven consonants, as reported in Table 3: four dental affricates (alveolars /ts - dʒ/ and prepalatals /tʃ - dʒ/), the prepalatal fricative /ʃ/, and the palatals (the nasal /n/ and lateral /ʌ/).

The alveolar affricates /ts/ and /dʒ/ are represented by the same single-letter <z>, which creates a homographic situation, while the

<footnote n="3">3. Measures of complexity and unpredictability are based on the Dual-Route Cascaded Model (or DRC, see Ziegler, Perry, and Coltheart, 2000; Rastle and Coltheart, 1998; Paap and Noel, 1991). For the DRC model, the numbers represent the number of rules of each type, and the percentage out of the total number of rules in brackets.</footnote>
<table><caption>TABLE 2. Graphemic Complexity for the New Romance Phonemes in Italian (Neef and Balestra, 2011)</caption><tr><td>Number of letters</td><td>21</td></tr><tr><td>Fixed letter combinations</td><td>3 (&lt;gl&gt;, &lt;gn&gt;, &lt;sc&gt;)</td></tr><tr><td>Undetermined</td><td>5 (&lt;e&gt;, &lt;i&gt;, &lt;o&gt;, &lt;s&gt;, &lt;z&gt;)</td></tr><tr><td>Context-dependent</td><td>6 (&lt;c&gt;, &lt;g&gt;, &lt;gl&gt;, &lt;i&gt;, &lt;s&gt;, &lt;sc&gt;)</td></tr><tr><td>Inherently ordered</td><td>13 (&lt;b&gt;, &lt;c&gt;, &lt;d&gt;, &lt;f&gt;, &lt;g&gt;, &lt;l&gt;, &lt;m&gt;, &lt;n&gt;, &lt;p&gt;, &lt;r&gt;, &lt;s&gt;, &lt;t&gt;, &lt;v&gt;)</td></tr><tr><td>Complex correspondence rules</td><td>4 (&lt;c&gt;, &lt;g&gt;, &lt;i&gt;, &lt;s&gt;)</td></tr></table>

<table><caption>TABLE 3. Graphemes representing the seven new Romance consonants in Italian</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Followed by /a, o, u/</th><th>Followed by /e/</th><th>Followed by /i/</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>/ts/</td><td>z</td><td>z</td><td>z</td></tr><tr><td>/dz/</td><td>z</td><td>z</td><td>z</td></tr><tr><td>/tʃ/</td><td>ci</td><td>c</td><td>c</td></tr><tr><td>/dʒ/</td><td>gi</td><td>g</td><td>g</td></tr><tr><td>/ʃ/</td><td>sci</td><td>sc</td><td>sc</td></tr><tr><td>/n/</td><td>gn</td><td>gn</td><td>gn</td></tr><tr><td>/ʌ/</td><td>gli</td><td>gli</td><td>gl</td></tr></tbody></table>

palatal nasal is always represented by a digraph. All other cases present heterographic situations: the affricates' graphemes are both a single-letter grapheme and a digraph, while the prepalatal /ʃ/ and the palatals /ɲ - ʌ/ are always written with complex graphemes (digraphs or trigrams). Furthermore, the graphic representation of the affricates and palatals changes depending on the following vowel. Finally, the spelling of the three prepalatals /tʃ - dʒ - ʃ/ is somewhat ambiguous (see Table 4) because, in the Italian writing system, they can be easily confused with velar stops and the consonant sequence /sk/. In fact, these phonemes are graphically differentiated from each other simply by using the diacritical letters <i> and <h>.

<table><caption>TABLE 4. Graphemes representing Italian prepalatals (2 affricates and 1 fricative), velar stops and a consonant cluster (fricative + stop)</caption><tr><td>/tʃ/</td><td>c - ci</td><td>/k/</td><td>c - ch</td></tr><tr><td>/dʒ/</td><td>g - gi</td><td>/g/</td><td>g - gh</td></tr><tr><td>/ʃ/</td><td>sc - sci</td><td>/sk/</td><td>sc - sch</td></tr></table>
## 4. Diachronic Development

Italian is a Romance language spoken today primarily in Italy, and it is derived from the vernacular spoken in Florence in the fourteenth century. Like other contemporary Romance languages, such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, Italian is a linguistic continuation of Latin. At the beginning of its language development path, from the tenth to the fifteenth century, a linguistic pastiche indicated the lack of a real linguistic border between Latin and Romance Italian. In fact, if we compare the Romance languages according to their diachronic typology, the Florentine-based Italian represents one of the linguistic systems that are the least distant from the initial Latin matrix, and therefore more conservative compared to Romance languages such as French and Romanian, whose evolutions are the most marked (Banniard, 2008).

Until the sixteenth century, Latin remained as the main written language in the Italian states. For a long time, the Romance language struggled to have enough distance from its language of origin, an attribute vital to create a new sociolinguistic identity for the same community. Although a number of Florentine and non-Florentine intellectuals eventually succeeded in making Italian independent of Latin, their initial proximity is the main cause of the GPC inconsistencies still present in Italian today. Particularly in the first period of time, different structures of language were influenced by other Romance languages, especially French and Provençal, even at the grapho-phonological level. They were uniquely appreciated and used in the northern regions of Italy, close to the Alpine border, but their success and prestige also had considerable influence on Italo-Romance languages geographically more distant, such as the formal Sicilian used by several poets at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. In the first centuries of Italian diachronic development, there were numerous spelling variations at the individual, local, and regional levels (cf. Cornagliotti, 1988; Maraschio, 1993; Presutti, 2019). Within the same text, it was even possible to use multiple alphabets apart from Latin, such as Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic (cf. Coluccia, 2002).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a substantial debate developed around the creation of a single standard language, both oral and written, for all Italo-Romance communities. This common objective of most Italian scholars was supported by the printing revolution as well. For that reason, a common writing system was institutionalized, fixed by a set of rules. The written language played a pivotal role in the standard oral language development. Writing was considered the basis for speech, serving as its model and its point of departure, rather than one of its subsequent steps (a trajectory unlike those of other European languages).
After that period of time, the standardized version of the Italian writ-
ing system did not change until recently, despite linguistic and political
unification and the beginning of the mass literacy phase.

4.1. Attempted Spelling Reforms

To further explicate the previous section, I present an in-depth analysis
of the language reforms which tried to improve the Italian GPC incon-
sistency throughout the centuries, from its origins to the present day.

Distinguished scholars have proposed many attempted spelling re-
forms over time; however, there were two particular types of spelling
reformers: the etymologists, who wanted to reduce the distance of the
Latin roots of words, and the phoneticians, who wanted to improve
the Romance grapheme-phoneme correspondence and to accelerate the
written comprehension and production. In these ways, they tried to
solve the homographic and heterographic complexity derived from the
use of the Latin alphabetical system, the language of origin with a differ-
ent phonological system. Despite their attempts, none of the proposals
to change spelling were accepted. It is for this reason that the Italian lan-
guage still presents the same spelling-sound inconsistencies of the six-
teenth century, the period in which its spelling was standardized. This
was not so much due to a conservative tendency of the written language
in relation to the oral one<fnref n="4" />, but rather to a form of inertia in the Italian
alphabetical system.<fnref n="5" />

Below, I give three examples of spelling reform proposals in Italian.<fnref n="6" />
The first one was suggested in 1435 by the Florentine intellectual and
architect Leon Battista Alberti who was the same author of the first Ital-
ian grammar. Alberti suggested listing the alphabetical letters (standard
and new graphemes) in a different order based on the graphic complex-
ity: from the easiest to write to the most difficult (cf. Fig. 1). However,
his spelling reform proposal was incomplete because he did not consider
all the phonemes present in Italian, and thus it did not solve the GPC in-
consistency.

During the standardization period between the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, many literates such as Trissino, Bartoli, Tolomei, and
Fiorenzuola, attempted to improve the grapheme-phoneme correspon-
dence consistency. The Italian spelling institutionalization period was

<footnote n="4">4. For centuries, the development of the Italian writing system followed a different path from that of pronunciation.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. There have been several forms of resistance: socio-educational, economic and aesthetic. For further details, see Maraschio, 1993.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. For a more detailed description, see Maraschio, 1992b; Presutti, 2019.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_40.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Alphabetical reform proposed by Leon Battista Alberti (Gorni, 2012)</figcaption></figure>

accompanied by the same enthusiasm and several radical reform proposals. In fact, many grammarians criticized the use of the Latin alphabet as inadequate for Italian phonology, which led to debates about possible changes to the old writing system.

Another example of spelling reform was proposed by Giorgio Bartoli in 1584 (cf. Fig. 2). According to him, the main aim of spelling was to maintain perfect clarity in the one-to-one relationship between phoneme and simple grapheme, thus avoiding homographic and heterographic solutions and the use of digraphs or trigraphs. He urged
for an alphabet comprising thirty-five phonemes and corresponding graphemes. In reality, his proposal did not present a perfect bilateral correspondence for the seven target consonants of this paper. Instead, the two prepalatal affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ as well as the velar stops /k/ and /g/ were represented by two or three graphemes. Nonetheless, this was one of the best examples of attempted consistent bi-directionality between graphemes and phonemes in Italian. Yet because his proposal was not welcomed by the politicians, grammarians, or other intellectuals, the Italian writing system, again, did not change.

<table><caption>FIGURE 2. Alphabetical reform proposed by Giorgio Bartoli (Maraschio, 1992b)</caption><tr><td>a</td><td>animo</td><td>1</td><td>i</td><td>io</td><td>19</td></tr><tr><td>b</td><td>bontà</td><td>2</td><td>j</td><td>jerico</td><td>ierico</td><td>20</td></tr><tr><td>c</td><td>cera</td><td>3</td><td>l</td><td>leone</td><td></td><td>21</td></tr><tr><td>q</td><td>qane</td><td>cane</td><td>m</td><td>mare</td><td></td><td>22</td></tr><tr><td>q</td><td>diqo</td><td>dico</td><td>n</td><td>nero</td><td></td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>h</td><td>pehe</td><td>pesce</td><td>n</td><td>vento</td><td>vento</td><td>24</td></tr><tr><td>h</td><td>pehe</td><td>pece</td><td>o</td><td>moró</td><td></td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>c</td><td>caue</td><td>chiaue</td><td>o</td><td>ora</td><td>ora</td><td>26</td></tr><tr><td>d</td><td>dono</td><td></td><td>p</td><td>pane</td><td></td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>e</td><td>il mele</td><td></td><td>r</td><td>riua</td><td></td><td>28</td></tr><tr><td>e</td><td>meló</td><td>melo</td><td>s</td><td>casa</td><td></td><td>29</td></tr><tr><td>f</td><td>fiore</td><td></td><td>f</td><td>rofa</td><td>rosa</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>g</td><td>gente</td><td></td><td>t</td><td>terra</td><td></td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>g</td><td>girlanda</td><td>ghirlanda</td><td>u</td><td>umile</td><td></td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td>?</td><td>maPO</td><td>maglio</td><td>v</td><td>via</td><td>via</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>g</td><td>mago</td><td>magno</td><td>3</td><td>3elo</td><td></td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td>δ</td><td>accio</td><td>ghiaccio</td><td>z</td><td>zana</td><td>zana</td><td>35</td></tr><tr><td>g</td><td>ago</td><td>agio</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr></table>

Following this period of time, the interest in innovating the writing system was considerably reduced. Only the Italian political unification in the nineteenth century, and its related socio-political changes, again fueled the importance of improving the Italian spelling learning process in school education programs.

A third and final example of attempted spelling reform was suggested by the politician and glottologist Goidanich in 1910. Fig. 3 exhibits
five out of seven reported target graphemes and excludes the alveolar affricates. He created one distinctive sign for each of the seven new Romance consonants, basically merging lines and curves of digraphs and trigraphs into just one single sign. Thus, he ultimately resolved the biunivocity of these seven new consonants. Yet again, however, Goidanich's and other similar orthographic reforms did not succeed in radically changing the writing system's inconsistencies.

<figure><img src="image_41.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. Alphabetical reform proposed by Pier Gabriele Goidanich (Goidanich, 1910)</figcaption></figure>

## 5. New Romance Grapho-Phoneme Similarities

After describing the main diachronic steps of the seven target consonants' inconsistency, I discuss the similarities between them in this chapter.

I noticed previously (cf. section 3.1) that from an orthographic point of view, they present a complex graphemic unit. From a phonetic point of view, they have a high markedness because they are less common than other sounds in world language phonetic classifications (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996; Maddieson, 1984).

When also considering the phonological hierarchy proposed by Jakobson (1968), the appearance of phonemes in language learning follows a precise universal hierarchy, dividing the vocal tract into smaller and smaller sections in order to create the phonemic identified by Trubetzkoy (1971). If compared with other consonants such as stops, the
seven new Romance target phonemes are more difficult to produce (and to hear, according to the Quantal theory by Stevens, 1989⁷). Thus, they appear later or do not appear at all in the distinctive phonetic process that is the basis of the phonological system of each language. Considering the Italian learning process specifically, these phonemes are produced last both in mother tongue and second language context.<fnref n="8" /> In Table 5, I report the results of a recent experiment conducted by Italian speech therapists on the phonological development of Italian-speaking children (Tresoldi et al., 2018). They measured the average age of customary production, acquisition, and mastery of Italian consonants in an L1 context. The results, based on a large sample of participants aged 3 to 7 years old and representative of different geographical areas, showed that consonants such as plosives were mastered early by Italian children, while our seven target phonemes were the hindmost acquired segments.

To consider the writing as well, among the most common spelling mistakes made by native children and illiterates are again the complex graphemes representing these seven Romance phonemes. In Table 6, there are some examples of common spelling errors collected by Dardano (1993) and Tressoldi, Cornoldi, and Re (2017). The index of a recent Italian L2 textbook, reported in Fig. 4, show the same situation found in the mother tongue context. The textbook *Domani 1* (Guastalla and Naddeo, 2010) was targeted to beginners, particularly adult non-native speakers. First of all, the Italian second language pronunciation is taught toward the alphabet instead of the phonemes' acquisition; this spelling dominant approach is detrimental for learning all phonemes not represented by one single letter. Furthermore, complex graphemes are avoided, and they are only proposed later in various stages (particularly on chapters 3, 9 and 11; cf. Fig. 4). In the beginning, non-native students who study with this textbook can learn the grapheme-phoneme bilateral correspondences represented by the alphabet; however, they have to wait several units before learning the complex graphemes. Notably, in the third unit, they start using the contrast between affricates and velar stops, in the ninth unit the fricative, and finally, in the eleventh unit, they learn the nasal and lateral palatals.

In summary, the phonological learning order follows a precise hierarchy: in the beginning, it seeks the GPC consistency with the alphabet acquisition, and then it follows word frequency and phonological markedness parameters for the remaining phonemes represented by digraphs and trigraphs.

<footnote n="7">7. The notions of ease of articulation and auditory distinctiveness as influences on the phonetic structure of languages were suggested also by Martinet (1964), Lindblom (1990), Lindblom and Maddieson (1988).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. In addition, in chapter 4 we noticed that they were institutionalized late in the standard language.</footnote>
▶ indice

<table><caption>FIGURE 4. Index of the Italian L2 textbook Domani 1 (Guastalla and Naddeo, 2010)</caption><thead><tr><th>comunicazione</th><th>grammatica</th><th>lessico</th><th>testi scritti e orali</th><th>cultura</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td colspan="5">unità o l come ti chiami?</td></tr><tr><td>Chiedere e dire il nome</td><td>L'alfabeto</td><td>I nomi propri</td><td>• saluti ✝</td><td>• Modi per salutarsi<br>• Nomi propri più diffusi</td></tr><tr><td>Le espressioni Che significa?, Come si scrive?, Come scusa?</td><td>• numeri da 1 a 30<br>• Il verbo chiamarsi (io, tu, lui/lei)</td><td>I saluti</td><td>L'alfabeto ✝</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Le operazioni aritmetiche</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Salutare</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">unità 1 l di dove sei?</td></tr><tr><td>Chiedere e dire la provenienza e la destinazione</td><td>I verbi andare e essere (io, tu, lui/lei)</td><td>Le espressioni grazie, pregio, scusa<br>• Stazione e aeroporto</td><td>• Scritte in luoghi pubblici<br>• Annunci alla stazione ✝<br>• Dialogo in treno ✝</td><td>• Città Italiana<br>• Fare conoscenza</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">unità 2 l mi dai il tuo numero?</td></tr><tr><td>Chiedere e dare il numero di telefono</td><td>Il verbo avere (io, tu, lui/lei)</td><td>Dati anagrafici</td><td>Dialogo in treno ✝</td><td>• Scambiare i dati anagrafici</td></tr><tr><td>Chiedere l'età</td><td>• numeri da o a 100</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">unità 3 l tutti in piazza!</td></tr><tr><td>Agire una telefonata</td><td>I nomi</td><td>Luoghi della città</td><td>• Volantino<br>• Dialogo in treno ✝</td><td>• Ecologia<br>• Città Italiana</td></tr><tr><td>Concordare il luogo di un appuntamento</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>L'espressione Come si dice in italiano...?</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">▶ Storia a fumetti Episodio 1</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">▶ Fonetica l suoni [k] e [g] / l suoni [g] e [dʒ]</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">unità 9 l al bar</td></tr><tr><td>Salutare in modo informale e formale</td><td>Gli articoli indeterminativi</td><td>Cibi e bevande al bar</td><td>Dialogo al bar ✝</td><td>• Andare al bar</td></tr><tr><td>Richiamare l'attenzione di qualcuno in modo informale e formale</td><td>Anche / Neanche</td><td>Tipi di acqua</td><td>• Menù</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Chiedere e dire il prezzo</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">▶ Storia a fumetti Episodio 3</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">▶ Fonetica l suoni [sk] e [ʃ] / Le doppie</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">unità 10 l la mia giornata</td></tr><tr><td>Dire a che ora si fa una cosa</td><td>• verbi riflessivi</td><td>Azioni quotidiane</td><td>Fumetto umoristico<br>• Forum</td><td>• Il bagno in Italia</td></tr><tr><td>Dire in che momento della giornata si fa una cosa</td><td>Anche / Neanche<br>• Gli articoli con i giorni della settimana<br>• I possessivi</td><td>Gli avverbi di frequenza<br>• I giorni della settimana</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">unità 11 l in famiglia</td></tr><tr><td>Parlare della propria famiglia</td><td>Gli aggettivi possessivi e i nomi di parentela</td><td>Nomi di parentela</td><td>Dialogo a cosa ✝</td><td>• La famiglia italiana</td></tr><tr><td>Esprimere accordo o disaccordo</td><td>C'è / Ci sono<br>• I numeri dopo 1.000</td><td>• Oggetti personali</td><td>• Lettere ad un giornale</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Fare una proposta e accettare</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Incoraggiare</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Introdurre un nuovo discorso</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">▶ Storia a fumetti Episodio 4</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">▶ Fonetica l suoni [k] e [ʃ] / Le doppie</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><caption>TABLE 5. Age of acquisition of Italian phonemes (years; months) (Tresoldi et al., 2018)</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Age of customary<br>production (≥ 50 %)</th><th>Acquisition age<br>(≥ 75 %)</th><th>Mastery<br>(≥ 90 %)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>[p]</td><td></td><td></td><td>≤ 3; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[t]</td><td></td><td></td><td>≤ 3; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[m]</td><td></td><td></td><td>≤ 3; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[n]</td><td></td><td></td><td>≤ 3; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[b]</td><td></td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>3; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[l]</td><td></td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>3; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[k]</td><td></td><td>3; 6</td><td>4; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[d]</td><td></td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>4; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[f]</td><td></td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>4; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[v]</td><td>3; 6</td><td>4; 0</td><td>4; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[g]</td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>4; 0</td><td>4; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[ŋ]</td><td>3; 6</td><td>4; 0</td><td>5; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[dz]</td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>4; 0</td><td>5; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[ʃ]</td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>4; 6</td><td>5; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[tʃ]</td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>4; 0</td><td>6; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[r]</td><td>4; 0</td><td>4; 6</td><td>6; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[z]</td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>3; 6</td><td>6; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[ts]</td><td></td><td>6; 0</td><td>6; 6</td></tr><tr><td>[dz]</td><td>3; 6</td><td>5; 6</td><td>7; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[ʌ]</td><td>5; 0</td><td>6; 0</td><td>7; 0</td></tr><tr><td>[s]</td><td>≤ 3; 0</td><td>5; 6</td><td>7; 6</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>TABLE 6. Illiterates and children's wrong spelling examples</caption><tr><td>&lt;g&gt; - &lt;gi&gt;</td><td>litigare > litigiare</td></tr><tr><td>&lt;c&gt; - &lt;ci&gt;</td><td>arance > arancie</td></tr><tr><td>&lt;gli&gt; - &lt;gl&gt;</td><td>figlia > figla</td></tr><tr><td>&lt;gn&gt; - &lt;gni&gt;</td><td>montagna > montagnia</td></tr></table>

## 6. An Example: the Palatal Lateral Approximant

Now I focus on one of these seven new Romance phonemes in Italian: the palatal lateral approximant /k/. A more in-depth examination of one of the target elements can help to better understand the possible and diversified motivations that led to the contemporary grapheme-phoneme correspondence inconsistency. Moreover, the palatal lateral’s institutionalization and survival in Italian could serve as an ideal example of how the processes of etymological conservation and national identity creation can be more important than GPC consistency improvement.

This New Romance phoneme was mainly used in the Florentine dialect—which was the most influential Italo-Romance dialect and the
basis of standard Italian—and in formal contexts by Italian literates and nobles.<fnref n="9" /> The palatal lateral presents an extremely high phonological markedness among world languages (Maddieson, 1984). When compared with the other more frequent Italian lateral, the alveolar /l/, the comprehension and production of the palatal are more complex (cf. Figs. 5 and 6). From both an acoustic and articulatory point of view, it can be easily misunderstood—by natives and others—with other sounds present in the Italian phonetic panorama such as the yod and the phonemic group /lj/ (Bladon and Carbonaro, 1978; Oliveira et al., 2016).

<figure><img src="image_42.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 5. Sagittal sections of the lateral alveolar /l/ and palatal /ħ/ (Canepari, 2004)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_43.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 6. Transverse sections of the oral cavity: lateral articulation of /l/ and unilateral of /ħ/ (Canepari, 2004)</figcaption></figure>

To refer to the previous study reported in Table 5 (cf. Tresoldi et al., 2018), the palatal lateral is one of the last learnt phonemes by a native child, mastered at 6-7 years instead of 3-4 years like most of the other ones.

With regard to its spelling, the palatal lateral is still represented today by a digraph or a trigraph, depending on the following vowel (cf. Table 7). Before the standardized version of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, this phoneme was represented by a high number of graphemes (the most common ones are exhibited in Table 8). Additionally, there were several spelling alternatives proposed by scholar reformers over

<footnote n="9">9. For further details of the diachronic development of the palatal lateral in Italian, see Presutti (2019).</footnote>
time (some of them are represented in Fig. 7). As previously mentioned, all of them were ignored by the political institutions.

<table><caption>TABLE 7. Current graphemes of</caption><tr><td>&lt;gli&gt;</td><td>&lt;gl&gt;</td></tr><tr><td>followed by /a, e, o/</td><td>followed by /i/</td></tr><tr><td>i.e., foglia, foglie, foglio</td><td>fogli</td></tr></table>

<table><caption>TABLE 8. Graphemes representing the over time (in the word moglie, wife)</caption><tr><td>&lt;li&gt;</td><td>&lt;lli&gt;</td><td>&lt;gl&gt;</td><td>&lt;lgl&gt;</td><td>&lt;lg&gt;</td></tr><tr><td>i.e., molie</td><td>mollie</td><td>mogle</td><td>mogle</td><td>molge</td></tr><tr><td>&lt;lgi&gt;</td><td>&lt;lgli&gt;</td><td>&lt;ll&gt;</td><td>&lt;lh&gt;</td><td>&lt;lhy&gt;</td></tr><tr><td>i.e., molgie</td><td>molglie</td><td>mullere</td><td>mulbere</td><td>mulbyere</td></tr></table>

<figure><img src="image_44.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 7. Some graphic alternatives proposed over time by spelling reformers such as (a) Tolomei in 1525, (b) Bartoli in 1584 and (c) Goidanich in 1910</figcaption></figure>

## 7. Conclusion

This paper has presented some insights into grapheme-phoneme correspondence inconsistencies in a highly transparent spelling system such as Italian, particularly apropos of the seven last institutionalized elements in the Italian phonological system. These target consonants are among the most difficult grapho-phonemes to be learnt and mastered. This paper has demonstrated that the reasons why they represent the main grapheme-phoneme correspondence inconsistency in Italian are strongly linked with the diachronic language development and with similar characteristics of phonological markedness and learning.
In general, the Italian writing system's strong resilience to change and improvement can be explained with the positive concept of "relative imperfection" which, in an original way, resolves the complex linguistic-identity stratification of Italian-speaking communities. On one hand, this national writing system was considered a stable and common communication tool for a highly heterogeneous population. On the other hand, it was considered flexible as it was able to accept all regional and local dialectal oscillations. Those two features allowed the Italian people to maintain their multiple linguistic identities. From a semantic point of view, the oral and written complexity of these seven New Romance grapho-phonemes could represent the effort that even native Italian speakers should make in order to speak and write the dominant language correctly. Thus, future studies of the GPC of other languages should consider the importance of the etymological and national identity creation and preservation processes. In truth, they are vital to understanding grapheme-phoneme correspondence inconsistency. In conclusion, this paper has offered alternative paths to explain GPC inconsistencies in a shallow language such as Italian. It has done so in the hope that the diachronic language development, phonological markedness, and grapho-phonological acquisition processes will be considered for further academic discussion concerning the GPC consistency of deep and shallow writing systems.

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<figure><img src="image_45.png" /></figure>
# A Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for a People —The Coptic Alphabets

Victoria Fendel

*Abstract.* The paper looks at the beginnings of the Coptic alphabet in first-and second-century Egypt from different angles. It reviews and builds on the sometimes-contradictory research from the social perspective while also consid-ering practical challenges for the ancient writers. It explores the relevance of cognitive factors regarding the transition to the first alphabetic writing system for the Egyptian language.

In the later Roman period (1st / 2nd c. AD), new writing systems to notate the Egyptian language emerged, which were to suit the needs of the evolved Egyptian language. The Greek alphabet and the Demotic script served as their models and resources. The impetus for this change must be sought in the social setting. The paper pulls together socio-linguistic and empirical past research and adds the cognitive-linguistic angle. This contribution is not a complete account of the argument, but a deeper dive into three issues that sharpen aspects of the argument made and the hypothesis put forward.

Egyptian could be written with three writing systems for most of its history. These were a cursive for day-to-day writing, a script primarily used in religious contexts, and a script used for monumental inscrip-tions (Houston, Baines, and Cooper, 2003, pp. 440–442). The day-to-day writing system has traditionally lent its name to the stage of Egypt-ian since Ptolemaic times. Thus, we speak of Demotic in the Ptolemaic and early Roman periods and of Coptic in the later Roman and early Byzantine periods. These labels are solely owing to research traditions; the Egyptian language developed continuously.

Egypt came under Ptolemaic rule in the aftermath of Alexander's vic-tories (4th c. BC) and under Roman rule following Octavian's / Augustus' victory at Actium (1st c. BC). The later Roman period saw a political, so-cietal and cultural turnover. Politically, the central power weakened, as

<figure><img src="image_46.png" /></figure>
evident in the requirements for valid wills after the Constitutio Antonini-
ana (AD 212) granted citizenship to many inhabitants of the empire. The
requirements related to the distinction between Roman and non-Roman
wills disappeared and Egyptian became a permissible language (Garel
and Nowak, 2017). Societally, we see mixture. Naming practices regard-
ing double names indicate a thorough mixture of the Greek and Egypt-
ian social brackets in everyday life. Successful individuals such as the no-
tary Hermias (Vierros, 2012) in Ptolemaic Pathyris, and the businessman
Phoibammon in early Byzantine Aphrodito (Keenan, 2007, pp. 233–237)
confirm Kraus’ (2000) hypothesis that social brackets were increasingly
determined by wealth rather than ethnicity. Economically, we observe
decline. The building activity in villages and cities decreased and the
defence system finally crumbled under the Sassanid attacks (7th c. AD)
(Foss, 2003; Keenan, 2007; Kiss, 2007; Sänger, 2011; van Minnen, 2007).
In this setting, local and clerical, Christian, institutions took on new tasks
in the educational and administrative spheres (Fournet, 2019, Chapter 4;
Quack, 2017b; Wipszycka, 2007).

The Coptic alphabet emerged as the most salient strand amongst sev-
eral writing systems, which drew on the Greek alphabet and the Demotic
script as models and graphemic resources (Quack, 2017a). Apparently,
a range of small communities of practice<fnref n="1" /> developed writing systems in
this period of time, potentially motivated by the general atmosphere of
change. The predominance of the Coptic alphabet results from social
factors, whereas the origins of the Coptic alphabets are also linked to
the cognitive concept of a best fit between a writing system and the lan-
guage to be represented.<fnref n="2" />

Socio-linguistically, we notice the imbalance between Greek and
Egyptian with regard to Matras' (2009) criteria for a language to be
successful in a bilingual setting, which we extend to a writing system:
a writing system, educational backing, and political backing. Quack
(2017a) and Choat (2012) prove wrong convincingly Bagnall's (1993) hy-
pothesis that there was a gap of about 150 years between the disappear-
ance of the Demotic and the emergence of the Coptic scripts. Nonethe-
less, at the time, the Greek alphabet was an established writing system
with educational and political backing, whereas the Coptic script was in
its infancy.

<footnote n="1">1. A community of practice is a group of people who is engaging in exchange of knowledge and practices. Prime examples are schools (Unwin, Hughes, and Jewson, 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Alternative hypotheses: Demotic was no longer fit for the current stage of the language (Dieleman, 2005, p. 71; Stadler, 2008, pp. 159–160), Coptic evolved as an in-group writing system (Bagnall, 2005; Choat, 2012, p. 588; Quack, 2017a, p. 73; Torallas Tovar, 2004b, p. 59; Torallas Tovar and Vierros, 2019, p. 488), Coptic evolved in the context of local nationalistic uprisings (Choat, 2009, p. 354; Clackson, 2010, p. 94). As the references show, all of these have been refuted.</footnote>
Socio-culturally, we see, as mentioned, contact in day-to-day life intensify. This is not least evident in the widespread use of loanwords, from Egyptian into Greek and vice versa, referring to everyday realities (Förster, 2002; Torallas Tovar, 2004a,b; 2007; 2017).<fnref n="3" /> The use of loanwords is particularly common in the context of Christianity, the rise of which constitutes the most fundamental cultural change of the time (Edict of Milan, AD 313, Edict of Thessalonika, AD 380) (Depauw and Clarysse, 2013; Houston, Baines, and Cooper, 2003). In examples such as ‘father’, the Egyptian word remained the everyday word, whereas the Greek loanword acquired a specialised Christian meaning.

These sociolinguistic and sociocultural settings make drawing upon the Greek alphabet as a model and resource comprehensible. Yet, they also show how in-groups, such as the early Christians, could promote new writing systems very successfully. By contrast, the origins of the systemic change from a largely supraphonemic to a phonemic writing system is linked to phonological changes affecting the fit of the writing system to the language, conceptualised in the grain size theory. We call supraphonemic a writing system that maps phonological units such as syllables onto graphemes; we call phonemic a writing system that maps phonemes onto graphemes (Perfetti and Verhoeven, 2017, p. 23). The inherited Egyptian scripts were mixed. They combined consonantal, bi-consonantal and triconsonantal phonograms, ideogrammatic logograms and determinatives (Gardiner, 1957, paras 6, 17, 22, 23).<fnref n="4" /> Some vowels could be indicated (i.e.,  /a/, j /i/, and w /u/), but vowel writing was not consistent.

<figure><img src="image_47.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Non-alphabetic vs. alphabetic writing systems</figcaption></figure>

The absence of a one-to-one correspondence between a script and a writing system makes possible changes in the writing system for any language. Any writing system is a reduction of the acoustic signal it represents based on the principles of economy and practicability. However, in theory, there is a best fit between a writing system and a language

<footnote n="3">3. There is no borrowing of inflectional morphology, which would point to renegotiating of identity (Matras, 2015).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Some signs can be phonograms or logograms, that is to indicate a sound or a meaning. Determinatives are added to a phonologically represented word in order to disambiguate the meaning. For example, nb 'everyone' vs. ἀληθή 'lord' (Ockinga, 2012, p. 2).</footnote>
based on the size of the unit mapped onto a grapheme, that is the grain size (Baroni, 2011). In reality, this ideal fit might once have existed in the history of a writing system with a language but disappears when the language develops phonologically but the writing system is attached to it for non-linguistic reasons (cf. tradition, etc.).

The eventual Coptic alphabet is an elaborate adaptation of its Greek model. It is based on the Koine Greek alphabet rather than the earlier local Greek alphabets judging by the sound-grapheme mappings and inventory of graphemes (Horrocks, 2014, p. 170; Jeffery, 1990). The initial development was decentralised as not only Quack's (2017) observations regarding the regionalisation of Demotic in the preceding period, but primarily the letter shapes and inventories of Demotic-derived signs show.<fnref n="5" /> Quack (2017a) assumes that a functioning version of the Coptic alphabet was in circulation by AD 100, and the relaxation of linguistic norms in AD 212 would have helped promotion of any new script in circulation.

<table><caption>FIGURE 2. The Coptic alphabet (cf. Layton, 2011, paras 8, 13)</caption><thead><tr><th>Λ<br>/a/</th><th>Κ<br>/b/ (S)<br>/v/ (B, A)</th><th>Γ<br>/g/</th><th>Λ.<br>/d/</th><th>Ε<br>/e/</th><th>Σ<br>/z/</th><th>Ζ<br>/c/</th><th>Η<br>/e/</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Θ<br>/t/+/h/</td><td>Ι<br>/y/</td><td>Κ<br>/k/</td><td>Λ<br>/l/</td><td>Μ<br>/m/</td><td>Ν<br>/n/</td><td>Ξ<br>/k/+/s/</td><td>Ο<br>/o/</td></tr><tr><td>Π<br>/p/</td><td>Ρ<br>/r/</td><td>Γ<br>/s/</td><td>Τ<br>/t/</td><td>Υ / ΟΥ<br>/w/</td><td>Φ<br>/p/+/h/</td><td>Χ<br>/k/+/h/</td><td>Ψ<br>/p/+/s/</td></tr><tr><td>Ω<br>/ō/</td><td>Ψ<br>/š/</td><td>Θ<br>/f/</td><td>Η<br>/x/</td><td>Θ<br>/h/</td><td>Χ.<br>/č/</td><td>σ<br>/kγ/</td><td>†<br>/t/+/y/</td></tr></tbody></table>

Here, we turn to the three deeper-dive issues concerning the societal, phonological and cognitive aspects of the argument.

## 1. Society—Literacy Rates:

### Were Literacy Rates Favouring the Greek Alphabet?

The short answer to this question is yes, literacy rates were most probably favouring the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet was an estab-

<footnote n="5">5. Demotic-derived signs are those that are based on Demotic signs but likened to the other alphabetic signs, for instance with regard to filling roughly a rectangle on the line (Quack, 2017a).</footnote>
lished writing system in the Roman period. There was full educational and political backing for it. By contrast, Egyptian writing was on the way back up. Educational facilities were in the making (cf. monasteries); educational centres had to be established for the new writing system as the old temples, which were the educational centres for Demotic, were losing funding and status (Cribiore, 2001; Houston, Baines, and Cooper, 2003; Maehler, 1983). Different writing systems were still competing, and thus none of them had yet attained the status of a standard writing system. Political backing was still lacking (Fournet, 2019).<fnref n="6" /> Furthermore, the contexts for use of writing were more extensive for Greek than for Egyptian due to the administrative apparatus. Depauw (2009; 2012) has described extensively how Greek had taken over from Demotic.

Given the educational situation as well as the predominance of Greek in administrative circles, it is likely that literacy rates in Greek were significantly higher than literacy rates in Egyptian. This is where Stadler’s (2008, pp. 166–167) critical mass argument comes in. According to this, a writing system needs to be used by a significant number of people not only to stay alive as it were but also in order to be useful—sender and addressee need to be able to operate in the same writing system. This situation may have favoured the Greek alphabet.

## 2. Phonology—Vowel Writing:
Was There Pressure to Start Writing Vowels?

Overall, the impression is that there was some pressure to start writing vowels.

Firstly, earlier Egyptian already notated vowels occasionally in the form of the *matres lectionis*. *Matres lectionis* are signs that indicate a vowel in writing systems that do not notate vowels consistently. The relevant signs in Egyptian are aleph, iod and waw. They can represent a consonant or a vowel, but as *matres lectionis* always indicate vowels (Hornkohl and Khan, 2020; Werning, 2016).

Secondly, several systems experimenting with vowel writing in Egyptian competed in the early Roman period. Quack (2017a) lists (i) the Greek alphabet / Graeco-Egyptian, (ii) Demotic syllabic signs / syllabic writing, (iii) the Greek alphabet with some Demotic signs, (iv) Demotic mono-consonantal signs / alphabetic Demotic, and (v) the Greek alphabet with Demotic-derived signs / Old Coptic.

Thirdly, changes in the Egyptian syllable structure, such as an increase in open syllables and the development of biconsonantal onsets

<footnote n="6">6. Political backing refers to the acceptability of a language and writing system in all registers including highly formal ones.</footnote>
(Allen, 2013, pp. 13, 24; Loprieno, 1995, pp. 36–37), had made it increas-
ingly difficult to use a supraphonemic writing system. The Universal
Phonological Principle states that phonological information is accessed
before lexical information when reading (Baroni, 2011; Gleitman, 1985),
including in shallow orthographies such as Hebrew (Frost, 1994). Thus,
we prefer a writing system that represents the phonology of a language
at least approximately.

Finally, practically speaking, Greek loanwords were frequent in
everyday and Christian contexts. They were difficult to transcribe into
Demotic as their small number proves (Clarysse, 1987; 2013; Ray, 1994).
In essence, one had to delete the vowels while ensuring that the string
remained a unique signifier of the meaning and choose a determinative
(Crellin, 2018). This seems disadvantageous in a thoroughly bilingual
environment.

ἀποχή apokʰē 'receipt'

(a) 3pwgᶜ [bookroll determinative] (P. Berl. 8043 verso 3.20; 4.10)

(b) pgᶜ [bookroll determinative] (JEA 55, 1969, 187)

<caption>FIGURE 3. Loanwords (cf. Clarysse, 2013)</caption>

Overall, there is no complete change of systems, but a move from
some vowel writing to consistent vowel writing. Competing systems
evolved around the same idea. The changing political and societal set-
tings may have offered opportunities for smaller groups to experiment
with an until then traditional 'untouchable' writing system. These same
political and societal settings allowed the Coptic alphabet to win out
eventually.

3. Cognition—Best Fit: Is One Script More Suitable for Representing a Language Than Another?

According to the grain size model, there is a better (if not a best) fit be-
tween a language and a writing system. The grain size of a writing sys-
tem is determined by (i) pressures towards smaller and orthographically
less complex units (i.e., granularity), (ii) pressures towards larger and
phonologically more accessible units (i.e., availability), and (iii) pres-
sures towards maximally consistent units (i.e., consistency) (Asfaha,
Kurvers, and Kroon, 2009; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). The phonolog-
ical structure of a language will favour one or the other type of writing system.<fnref n="7" />

However, there are pressures towards hanging on to a writing system even if the fit between language and writing system is not perfect. Firstly, users are familiar with the mapping principles of their writing system (Perfetti and Dunlap, 2008) and have to acquire new mapping principles when learning a new writing system (Bassetti, 2016; Hirshorn and Fiez, 2014; Keiko, 2002; Lallier and Carreiras, 2018). Secondly, cultural, social and political pressures impact on updating vs. preserving and switching vs. retaining a writing system. Some relevant aspects include the readability by regular interlocutors<fnref n="8" />, access to training, the prestige and cultural significance attached to a script<fnref n="9" />, and the resources using this script that would have to be modified.<fnref n="10" /> In fact, Thomason's (2001) argument that attitudinal factors override linguistic factors with regard to language change could be transferred onto script change. Her claim has been variously contested, yet attitudinal factors are far from irrelevant.

A prime example of a writing system people hung on to is Demotic, which is often described as conservative (Depauw, 1997, p. 36; Oréal, 1999, p. 295; Richter, 2009, p. 403; Thompson, 2009, p. 399), yet remained the Egyptian writing system until Coptic emerged.

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* Bagnall, R. (1993). *Egypt in late antiquity*. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

* (2005). "Linguistic Change and Religious Change: Thinking about the Temples of the Fayoum in the Roman Period." In: *Christianity and Monasticism in the Fayoum Oasis: Essays from the 2004 International Symposium of the Saint Mark Foundation and the Saint Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society in Honor of Martin Krause*. Ed. by G. Gabra. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, pp. 11–19.

<footnote n="7">7. Perfetti and Verhoeven (2017, p. 23) list syllabic, morpho-syllabic, alpha-syllabic, abjad and alphabetic writing systems.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. A modern example is transcriptions of Chinese (Chappell, 1980).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. A modern example might be the Greek alphabet in modern-day Europe.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10. A literary example is Orwell's 1984.</footnote>
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# Old Aramaic Script in Georgia

Helen Giunashvili

*Abstract.* Old Aramaic and its script are most important to the history of the Georgian culture. On the territory of contemporary Georgia, particularly in its Eastern part, being historically Iberian kingdom (4th c. BC–4th c. AD), a number of original Aramaic inscriptions are found. They are inscribed on different objects and could be dated by the period of 3rd c. BC–3rd c. AD.

The greater part of these Aramaic inscriptions is executed in a variety of the North-Mesopotamian type of Aramaic script, known as “Armazian,” one of the outgrowths of the Imperial (Official) Aramaic writing, widely used in Achaemenid Empire (550 BC–330 BC).

The whole corpus of the Aramaic inscriptions of Georgia requires systematic interdisciplinary researches, for revealing the main trends of its typological development in the light of Near Eastern-South Caucasian cultural-linguistic interference.

## 1. Introduction

Aramaic is of great importance for Georgia. All the three historical phases of this language: Old, Middle and Modern are well represented in the Georgian cultural tradition (K. Tsereteli, 1994).

On the territory of contemporary Georgia, mainly in its Eastern part–Kartli historically Iberian kingdom (4th c. BC–4th c. AD), a number of original Aramaic inscriptions were found.

They were made on different objects: steles (an epitaph and a victory stele), bone plates, wine-pitchers, silver bowls, and household items, stones of sanctuary buildings and sarcophagi, jewels. For the present, the whole corpus of inscriptions comprises nearly 100 units dated by 3rd–2nd c. BC–3rd c. AD (K. Tsereteli, 1998b) and kept at different

<figure><img src="image_48.png" /></figure>
funds of the National Museum of Georgia.<fnref n="1" /> These ancient Aramaic inscriptions were discovered in Mtskheta, the capital of Iberia, as well as its outskirts—Armazi, Bagineti and other various locations in Central Georgia—Ulistsikhe, Urbnisi, Zghuderi, Bori, Dedoplis Gora (Min-dori), Dzalisa.<fnref n="2" />

The Aramaic inscriptions of Georgia are distinguished by their form and content. Some of them are quite extensive, such as Armazi steles and a number of dedicatory inscriptions dated by 3rd c. AD, found on golden bracelets from Armazi burials. The rest of inscriptions are rather short, consisting only of one or two words, denoting a proper name, or a title, they also frequently have an attributive meaning of weight, size and function of an object. The great part of these inscriptions still remains unpublished (K. Tsereteli, 1998b).

The Old Aramaic was one of chief written languages of Iberia before the adoption of Christianity (4th century AD).

Later Aramaic epigraphic monuments (4th–5th c. AD), also revealed in Mtskheta, belong to a particular category. They were created by the Jewish community of Mtskheta, and are written in Hebrew characters, while their language is Aramaic (Jewish-Palestinian dialect) (G. Tsereteli, 1962, pp. 377–378; K. Tsereteli, 1996; 1998a; Shaked, 2006).

Origins of spreading the Aramaic language in Georgia and, generally, in the South Caucasus are to be traced in the Achaemenian epoch (6th–4th c. BC) of the Persian Empire, when firm foundations of Iranian statehood and national culture were laid, and it was widely used as the official language of the Empire.

The most ancient Aramaic inscription found in Georgia, is the inscription on the silver bowl from the Kazbegi treasure (5th c. BC), being a specimen of Achaemenid art, brought into this region of the Iranian dominance. Most scholars considered the bowl’s inscription as a proper name of its owner (K. Tsereteli, 2001b) (Fig. 1).<fnref n="3" />

Iberian kingdom and Kartvelian tribes are not mentioned in the extant Old Persian inscriptions; however, rich historical-archaeological material and linguistic-philological evidences testify the strong Iranian cultural impact on this region.

<footnote n="1">1. For the first complete list of these inscriptions see Gagoshidze and Tsotselia, 1991, pp. 71–72; cf. also Giorgadze, 2008, pp. 253–255.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. All these geographic sites are important historical places, where the most valuable archaeological discoveries have been made. On their description and catalogue, see Furtwängler, Gagoshidze, Löhr, and Ludwig, 2008, pp. 257–272.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. The bowl was found in Georgia, in the village of Stepantsminda (Kazbegi) and is kept at present at the State Historical Museum of Russia (inventory number SB1735, weight ~ 266,5 grams). The Aramaic inscription and the photo of this bowl was first included in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, 1889, and later in the Corpus of Canaanite and Aramaic Inscriptions by Donner and Röllig, 1969.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_49.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_50.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Kazbegi silver bowl with the Aramaic inscription, photos reprinted from Smirnov (1909, N 13, Table III).</figcaption></figure>

The introduction of administrative, social, political and legal institutions evolved in the Achaemenid Empire in the South Caucasus was of great significance. These institutions and socio-economic processes taking place in the Achaemenid period played an important role in the emergence and development of the Iberian and Armenian kingdoms (G. Tsereteli, 1974).

Medieval Georgian chronicles (11th c.) preserve particularly valuable data on this subject. One of them, *The Life of Kartli* (consisting of multiple sources several of which are of remarkable antiquity) narrates that the first Georgian king Parnavaz (Pharnabazos, Greek Φαρνάβαζος),<fnref n="4" /> who was a representative of a powerful aristocratic family from Mtskheta and was coroneted about 280 BC., created his state “like the kingdom of the Persians” (Qaukhchishvili, 1955, p. 21; Metreveli, 2008, p. 44).

One of the chapters of *The Life of Kartli* dealing with the life and deeds of the Georgian king mentions Aramaic among languages widespread in pre-Christian Iberia: “Six languages were spoken in Kartli: *Armenian, Georgian, Khazar, Assyrian* (i.e., Aramaic), *Hebrew* and *Greek*. And all the kings of Kartli and all the men and women, knew these languages” (Qaukhchishvili, 1955, p. 16; Metreveli, 2008, p. 36).<fnref n="5" />

<footnote n="4">4. On the Iranian etymology of this royal name in Georgian, see Andronikashvili, 1966, pp. 496–499; Chkheidze, 1984, pp. 32–33, 47. For the complete bibliography on this name, etymological studies and its penetration in Armenian, see Martirosyan, to appear.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. On the use of the term Assyrian (language) in the meaning of Aramaic in Old Georgian, see K. Tsereteli, 1976, pp. 184–185.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_51.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2. (a) A portrait of King Parnavaz done by the Georgian painter Zurab Kapanadze (1924–1989). (b) Armazi Monolingual, photo made at the Stone Fund of the Georgian National Museum. (c) Armazi Bilingual, photo made at the Stone Fund of the Georgian National Museum.</figcaption></figure>

Georgian historiography ascribes to the first legendary king Parnavaz the creation of the Georgian writing (“Georgian literacy”) (Fig. 2a).

According to Professor Thomas Gamkrelidze's theory (Gamkrelidze, 1989), the “Georgian literacy” might have meant its introduction in the form of the so-called “alloglottography” or “writing-in-another-language” widely used in the Achaemenian chancelleries<fnref n="6" />, i.e., reading a text written in some widespread foreign language, in this case Aramaic, on the basis of the local language (the Georgian), before introducing the national script.

The existence of “literary traditions” in the pre-Christian Georgian World, where Old Aramaic alongside with Greek were widely used, should be assumed in the form of oral tradition and folklore. The introduction of national writing when Christianity was proclaimed as the state religion only served to record such tradition, and further strengthen and develop the literary language.<fnref n="7" />

<footnote n="6">6. The term “alloglottography” was established in *Ancient Iranian Studies* by Ilya Gershevitch (1979, pp. 114–119). For the modern studies of alloglottography in the Ancient Near Eastern cultural tradition, see Rubio (2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. Such oral traditions were strengthened also by a rule of rendering the Scripture in the newly Christianized Eastern world (and probably in Georgia, too) that may be called “Alloglottoepy” or “Saying-in-another-language,” when religious texts (of the Old, and especially New, Testament) were preached directly through oral rendering and translation. This contributed to the refinement and enrichment of the vocabu-</footnote>
The most ancient Georgian literary monuments are dated only by the 5th c. AD, the period when the written translation of the Scripture into Georgian has already been realized and recorded in the Old Georgian original script, Asomtavruli.

The Aramaic script used in Iberia passed a long way of development. It was one of the outgrowths of the Imperial (Official) Aramaic writing, widely used in Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), which displayed a remarkable uniformity. No regional forms of the script could be discerned, although ethnic groups of varied cultural background throughout the vast expanse of the realm used it⁸ (Naveh, 1972; Greenfield, 2001), the same script was used from Central Asia to Egypt, from the Caucasus to North Arabia (Greenfield, 1985, p. 709).

But after the fall of the Empire in the 3rd–2nd c. BC local varieties of the Old Aramaic script were developed in different cultural-geographic regions of the East, including Syria, North Mesopotamia,⁹ Georgia and Armenia. Most forms of local Aramaic scripts began to crystallize in the first century BC.

Aramaic inscriptions of the South Caucasus found in Armenia¹⁰ and mostly in Georgia clearly reflect this process (ibid., p. 702).

## 2. Studies on Old Aramaic Epigraphy in Georgia

The tradition of linguistic-paleographic studies of Old Aramaic epigraphy in Georgia is related to the name of the outstanding orientalist, Academician George (Giorgi) Tsereteli (1904–1973), who made a significant contribution to the decipherment and analysis of the Aramaic inscriptions discovered as a result of archaeological excavations at Armazi, near Mtskheta. To these inscriptions were devoted G. Tsereteli's two important works: *The Bilingual Inscription from Armazi* (1941, 1942) and *The Armazi Inscription of the Period of Mithridates the Iberian* (1962).

lary and terminology of the language, in which the preaching was performed and the canonical religious texts orally rendered. This, too, must have created the precondition for Georgian to have developed into a refined literary language by the time of the creation of Georgian Christian Script and its recording as a written language (Gamkrelidze, 1989, pp. 200–201).

8. On the Aramaic as an administrative language and *lingua franca* of the Persian Empire see also Folmer, 2011; 2020; Gzella, 2015b.

9. On the late Imperial Aramaic see Gzella, 2011; 2015a.

10. Old Aramaic inscriptions were discovered as well in Armenia, in different places, such as Zangezur, Teghut, Sevan, Sisian and Garni. They are inscribed on different objects: boundary stones, silver bowls, stones. Chronologically they could be attributed to 2nd c. BC-2nd c. AD. Their linguistic-paleographic studies were presented in the works of A. Perikhanian, 1964; 1965; 1966; 1971a,b.
As a result of paleographic studies of Mtskheta-Armazi inscriptions (11 lines bilingual (Greek-Aramaic) epitaphy, dated by 2nd c. AD (Fig. 2c)<fnref n="11" /> and 14-line Aramaic monolingual inscription dated by 1st c. AD) (Fig. 2b), G. Tsereteli identified hitherto unknown type of Aramaic script as “independent branch of Semitic writing” and named it “Armazi Aramaic” according to the place of its finding.<fnref n="12" />

The bilingual Aramaic-Greek inscription was an epitaph of “Serapitis, the daughter of Zevakh the Younger, viceroy (bths) of King Parsman, wife of Iodmangan the victorious and winner of many victories, master of the court (ἐπίτροπος) of King Xsefarnug, [and] son of Agrippa, master of the court of King Parsman.”

The second stele discovered near Mtskheta called Armazi Monolingual is known as the stele of victory of Sharagas, the viceroy of King Mithridates (1st c. AD).

The story in the text is told by Sharagas, who performed military operations, after the successful ending of which he reported to the great king Mithridates: “I gained this victory for you, my King”.

These extensive Aramaic inscriptions were of great historical and cultural significance. Social titles, personal names, political events attested in them present the most valuable material for pre-Christian Georgian history.

G. Tsereteli distinguished a number of linguistic and paleographic peculiarities of the Armazian script conditioned by close cultural links with Ancient Aramaic-Iranian commonwealth on the one hand and with Hellenic cultural world on the other. Thus, while considering texts of bilingual and monolingual inscriptions, G. Tsereteli defined several similarities with contemporary Middle Iranian (Parthian, Middle Persian) and Semitic (Palmyrene) scripts. At the same time, Greek influence was also evident. For example, in Bilingual inscription using *ayin for expressing ē in the proper name *Serapitis* (Aramaic *armazfit*, Greek Σηραπειτίς/Σηραπειτίς<fnref n="13" />) is the early exemple of *mater lectionis*,<fnref n="14" /> Iranian name Xšēfarnūy (in the Aramaic text חסיפרנוג) was rendered by Greek form (*Ksyprnwg*), in Mithridates’s inscription alongside with Aramaic *mlk*

<footnote n="11">11. The publication of the Armazi Bilingual attracted attention of many prominent Iranologists and Semitists. For the all reviews and notes on G. Tsereteli's work see G. Tsereteli, 1986, pp. 38–39, see also all scientific publications on this text: K. Tsereteli, 1992, pp. 115–118.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12. Both steles are kept at the Georgian National Museum, the Stone Fund, Bilingual (inventory number SSM 148) and Monolingual (SSM 149).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. This transcription is given according to T. Kauchtschischwili, 2009, p. 390.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14. Another example of *mater lectionis* is found in Greek-Aramaic inscription on the silver spoon from Zghuderi. There are two graffiti, one is Greek: *ΧΗΔ-Χηδ* and the other Aramaic: *κάδ-Κεδ*. It represents a complete or abbreviated name of the owner. The letter ᶜ (ʿayin) was used as *mater lectionis* in Aramaic scribal tradition of Georgia (Chelidze, 1993, p. 21; Braund, 1994, 215, n. 64).</footnote>
"the king" are attested Greek forms *bzys*, *bzls* (Βασιλεύς) and probably, Latin form *kysr* (Caesar) (G. Tsereteli, 1962, p. 375).

It is noteworthy, that local (Georgian) writing tradition was significantly reflected in the language and script of the Armazian inscriptions, namely, in similar outlines of several Armazian and Georgian letters, also transliteration and transcription of a number of Oriental terms and proper names, for example, Middle Iranian administrative name *bthš* "a viceroy" presented in Armazian writings differently: *bthš* (the bilingual inscription), *bytyʿbš* (the Bori inscription), which clearly reflects the impact of the Georgian orthography (cf. the Georgian *pʾitiaxš-i*) (G. Tsereteli, 1948b, p. 56).

Armazian inscriptions attest distinguished forms of Middle Iranian proper names of Georgian nobles. These names reflect various dialect layers (south-western, north-western and north-eastern) and are mostly rendered according to their adequate pronunciation, without following the principles of Iranian historical orthography, for example, *Mhrdt*, *Myhrdt* (Monolingual), *Sprwg* (Monolingual, cf. *Λσπαυρούνις* on II century gem from Armazi, Georgian Asparug), *Šrgs* (Monolingual), *Bwz-Myhr* (Bori inscription, cf. *Burzen-Mihr* in 5th c. Georgian inscription in Palestine), *Ywdmngn* (Bilingual).

G. Tsereteli outlined several distinctive grammatical characteristics as well as irregularities of the bilingual text (the lack of a definite article, misuse of genders, the absence of the determinative state, the use of archaic prounoun *zy*), which is certainly a result of the local Aramaic writing tradition.<fnref n="15" />

In Armazian writing Eastern and Western elements were transformed on the ground of the native culture, creating most original linguistic and paleographical material (ibid., p. 56). G. Tsereteli also named Armazian script as "Georgian-Aramaic" or "Iberian-Aramaic" (G. Tsereteli, 1942, 51, n. 2).

Studies of the Aramaic inscriptions from Armazi were of special significance not only as a new source for the research of Eastern Aramaic writing and its ramifications, but also shed light on a number of cultural-historical problems of pre-Christian Iberia and its interrelations with Ancient Iran.

The tradition of using the Aramaic script in pre-Christian Georgia is closely connected to the problem of the origins of the Georgian alphabet. G. Tsereteli considered it in genetic relation with the Aramaic script (G. Tsereteli, 1948a; 1949).

<footnote n="15">15. About the linguistic peculiarities of the Armazi inscriptions—and particularly about the Bilingual—that could not be due to scribal mistakes and misspellings, see Kutscher and Naveh, 1970; Skjaervø, 1995, p. 291.</footnote>
Apart from Serapitis and King Mithridates' steles, inscriptions on different objects found during the excavations at Mtskheta-Armazi were made in Armazi script.

In this respect, items found in Armazi necropoleis, notably golden plaques (2nd c. AD), silver plate of the pitiakhsh Bersuma, golden rings and bracelets (3rd–4th c. AD) are of a special interest due to their epigraphical value, as well as artistic quality. They reflect national artistic tradition together with contemporary Hellenistic and Oriental cultural style, including Iranian (Chubinashvili, 2007). (Fig. 3a–d).

G. Tsereteli has shown in his researches that the inscriptions found in Mtskheta-Armazi as well as some other epigraphical monuments of Georgia-Bori (2nd–3rd c. AD) (Fig. 3e and 4a), Urbnisi (2nd c. AD) (Fig. 4b), are done in the same “Armazian” script, which are distinguished with common paleographic features.

The inscriptions of Bori as stated by G. Tsereteli, showed a certain tendency to mannerism and stylization, “the lines are broken and in the break places sharp angles are formed,” which could be due to material on which the inscription was made.

The oldest one is the monolingual inscription (1st c. AD) made in cursive, where letters have little (if any) distinction from each other, cf. identical are *k* and *n* letters; *r* and *b*; ‘ and §; *t* and y etc. The script of the bilingual text is more formal (Fig. 4c), in which all letters have clearly outlined forms. Letters of the monolingual inscription (Fig. 2b), are distinguished by more variations compared to letters of the bilingual text. A number of letters in the bilingual inscription, as of the later monument, are significantly different from the monolingual’s (Fig. 4d).

Here it should also be noted that the writing of each mentioned monuments (1st–3rd c. AD) is characterized by certain specific paleographic features. We cannot come across absolutely identical writing of one and the same letters not only in different “Armazi” texts, but sometimes they cannot be attested within the same texts either. Certain variations of identical letters in the “Armazi” script monuments are quite acceptable, but they are very rare and fall within the general limits of the script.

In his later works G. Tsereteli assumed that the Armazian writing originated in “a variety” of the Aramaic script, which was spread in North-Eastern Mesopotamia (Assur, Hatra, Hassan-Kef, Sari) during the Hellenistic epoch.<fnref n="16" />

In 1961 in Garni (Armenia), an Aramaic stone-inscription was found. It was published in 1964, by Anahit Perikhanian (1964) and attributed to the 2nd c. AD. The writing of the inscription from Garni paleographically was the most similar from all the Aramaic scripts to that of the Armazian inscription (Fig. 5a). It became clear that the Armazian script

<footnote n="16">16. These issues were further tackled in the works of the German Semitist Oelsner, 1973, pp. 430–434; 1976.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_52.png" /><figcaption>(a)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_53.png" /><figcaption>(b)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_54.png" /><figcaption>(c)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_55.png" /><figcaption>(d)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_56.png" /><figcaption>(e)</figcaption></figure>

FIGURE 3. (a) The Plate of Bersuma, photo reprinted from Chubinashvili (2007, Illustration 28). (b) Bracelets, photo reprinted from Chubinashvili (2007, Illustration 17). (c) Serapitis' necklace and pendant with ram head relief, photo reprinted from Chubinashvili (2007, Illustration 7). (d) A gem portrait, photo reprinted from Chubinashvili (2007, Illustration 4). (e) Bori plate, photo reprinted from Smirnov (1909, N 305, Table CXXI:12).
<figure><img src="image_57.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_58.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_59.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_60.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 4. (a) A facsimile of the Bori plate inscriptions, reprinted from G. Tsereteli (1960, Table VI). (b) Aramaic inscription on the wine-cellar from Urbnisi, photo made at the Urbnisi Fund of the Georgian National Museum. (c) Armazi Bilingual's Aramaic inscription facsimile, reprinted from G. Tsereteli (1942, p. 15). (d) A table of Aramaic script types of Dedoplis Mindori plates (1st c. AD), Urbnisi inscription, reprinted from Gagoshidze and Tsotselia (1991, Addenda) and of Armazi Bilingual and Bori plate inscriptions, reprinted from G. Tsereteli (1948a, p. 100).</figcaption></figure>
was characteristic not only of Georgian reality, but also of neighbouring Armenia. A. Perikhanyan suggested that the inscriptions on the Armazi steles, on the plate of Bori as well as the Garni inscription were written in the same script.

Aspects of comparative-historical development of the Armazian script were considered later by Joseph Naveh in the work "North Mesopotamian Aramaic script-type in the Late Parthian period" Naveh (1972), where paleographic analysis of Armazian letters and close to them (but not identical) letters of the Garni inscription was dealt in the common evolutionary typological scheme of Eastern Aramaic inscriptions of that period (such as Hatra, Dura-Europos, Hassan-Kef and others), several deviations of Armazian script from other writings were shown and the main tendencies of its evolution as an original type in North-Mesopotamian Aramaic writing branch were outlined (Fig. 5b).

The tradition of epigraphic Aramaic studies in Georgia was continued by another outstanding scholar, the late Professor Konstantin Tsereteli (1921–2004), who offered several works to newly-discovered Aramaic inscriptions (Uplantsikhe, 3rd–2nd c. BC) (Fig. 6a, 6b), Dedoplis Mindori (1st c. BC) (Fig. 6c).

In K. Tsereteli's works innovative theoretical assumptions were presented about the Georgian type of Aramaic script, by distinguishing three stages in its development: Pre-Armazian (Uplantsikhe inscriptions–this script was very close to the Official Aramaic and was considered as the predecessor of the Armazian (K. Tsereteli, 2001d), Early Armazian (Dedoplis Mindori inscriptions, which displayed more archaic features than later monuments, K. Tsereteli, 1993; 2001c), Armazian itself (Armazi steles, Urbnisi inscription, Bori silver plate inscription, etc.).

By considering rich factological material, K. Tsereteli defined common tendencies of the Armazian script type development in the South Caucasus: in the 3rd–2nd c. BC, a variety of the Old Aramaic script begins to be formed in this region and took its final shape in the 1st c. BC. In Georgia "Armazian" type of Aramaic writing (1st–3rd c. AD) was raised, typologically similar to the Aramaic script of Armenia but not wholly its identical. In both countries this type of writing was used before the adoption of Christianity (K. Tsereteli, 2001a).

### 3. Future Prospects

Modern level of Old Aramaic Studies, new epigraphic findings and scientific publications essentially require a complex and systematic research of the Old Aramaic inscriptions of Georgia. The research will comprise two stages: (1) making a catalogue of edited inscriptions with their chronological distribution, photo material, texts, facsimiles, new
<figure><img src="image_61.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_62.png" /></figure>

A Comparative Script Chart:

Line 1. Hatra, No. 214

Line 5. 'Abrat al-Ṣaghira

Line 2. Hatra, No. 35

Line 6. Sari

Line 3. The Dura Europos

Line 7. Hassan-Kef

bilingual inscription

Line 8. Garni

Line 4. Assur

Line 9. Armazi

(b)

<caption>FIGURE 5. (a) The Garni inscription reprinted from J. Naveh (1972, p. 297).</caption>

<caption>(b) A comparative chart of the North-Mesopotamian Aramaic script types, reprinted from Naveh (1972, p. 299).</caption>
<figure><img src="image_63.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 6. (a), (b) Aramaic inscriptions on pieces of wine jars from Uplantsikhe, photos made at the Uplantsikhe Fund of the Georgian National Museum. (c) Aramaic inscription on a fragment of a wine pitcher from Dedoplis Mindori, photo taken at the Dedoplis Mindori Fund of the National Museum of Georgia.</figcaption></figure>

linguistic interpretations and comments together with a bibliographic index; (2) theoretical studies: a systematic linguistic-paleographic examination of published as well as unpublished material; their comparative analysis with Aramaic script of Armenia and other types of contemporary Eastern Aramaic writings; revealing paleographic peculiarities and evolutionary regularities of the South Caucasian Aramaic script.

The research will be essentially interdisciplinary, for the first time presenting the main tendencies of the Old Aramaic script's development in the light of Near Eastern—South Caucasian cultural-linguistic interference.
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# On the Typology of Writing Systems

Liudmila L. Fedorova

*Abstract.* The paper aims to propose a scheme for classification of writing systems, based on four binary characteristics of spelling: linear vs. non-linear spelling, integral vs. segmental one, complete vs. reduced, simple vs. differentiated spelling. The main attention is given to the non-linear emblematic writing, namely to Aztec script, which shows the examples of linguistic emblems—the first readable writing signs for place names and proper names. Further development of writing explores the techniques of segmentation and differentiation that contribute to the refinement of spelling, yet they go along with a trend to reduced and integrated forms, so we have today the coexistence of emblems-emoticons, Chinese characters and highly differentiated alphabets.

## 1. Introduction. The Problem of Typology of Writing Systems

The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate how the existing typology of writing systems can be further refined using additional criteria for classification based on the main capabilities of a writer and a reader to compose and decompose, to integrate and to differentiate.

When speaking about historical scripts, it is necessary to distinguish between, on the one hand, the first attempts of using graphic images and signs and, on the other hand, writing practices that have been developed, based on systems of signs. This division was firstly established by E. Taylor, who distinguished two stages, corresponding to pictography and phonography, the former considered as 'proto-writing', and the latter as 'true writing'.

The proto-writing stage is nevertheless not reduced to pictography alone, and the evolution of writing does not always correspond to the widespread cliché 'from picture to letter'.

Liudmila L. Fedorova

<figure><img src="image_64.png" /></figure>

0000-0002-2284-6643

Russian State University for the Humanities,
119421 Russia, Moscow, Obrucheva 28-8-105

E-mail: lfvoux@yandex.ru

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

Grapholinguistics and Its Applications (ISSN: 2681-8566, e-ISSN: 2534-5192), Vol. 5.

Fluxus Editions, Brest, 2021, pp. 805–824. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-graf-fedo

ISBN: 978-2-9570549-7-8, e-ISBN: 978-2-9570549-9-2
First of all, it should be noted that graphic signs can be used for dif-
ferent purposes and therefore for different functions: magic, social, cog-
nitive, mnemonic, decorative, etc., so that the communicative function
(transmission of messages) has been only one among others and obvi-
ously not the first one. The use of graphic (or painted) marks in many
cases does not differ substantially from the use of object signs such as
amulets, counting tokens, status attributes, etc. Totems and amulets
as signs of upper patronage could be objects or also graphic or painted
marks (e.g., a handprint on a cave wall), and similarly for signs of so-
cial status, of self-identification (e.g., tattoos), of property (tamgas), of
association or 'affiliation', of contract, of authenticity, of war or peace;
they could form their own symbolic systems of objects and marks, made
of distinct graphic images and 'empty' figures or lines without visible
reference. So the variety of possible finalities of graphic signs should be
taken into account in the investigation of the beginnings of writing per
se. The main distinction of writing signs from other marks is not their
form, but their function and the way they are used: for transmission of
information, for communication or just for demonstrative purposes.

Therefore writing systems can be regarded as a case of a more wide
class of semiotic systems, with their own tasks and ways of functioning.

When writing systems are conceived as linguistic systems, they are
defined according to their phonetic values and to their capability of
transmitting speech. While signs of most semiotic systems can be only
interpreted, signs of linguistic writing systems can be *read*, they refer to
language units.

The first classification of phonographic writing systems was pro-
posed in the 19th century in the works of I. Taylor ('The Alphabet'
1883, cf. Daniels, 1996)), it distinguishes logographic, syllabic and al-
phabetic systems. This division, though rather speculative, remains a
convenient scheme and a starting point for more detailed classifications.
Further contributions to the study and systematization of writing sys-
tems have been made by J. Friedrich, D. Diringer, C. Loukotka, I.J. Gelb,
V.A. Istrin, and others. At present, there are various classifications of
writing systems that examine in detail the relationship between writing
units and language units. These are works by J. Sampson, J. DeFrancis,
W. Bright, R. Sproat, P. Daniels, F. Coulmas, H. Rogers, M. Neef, and
others.

To return to the original classification, scholars admit that most writ-
ing systems have a mixed nature; first of all this concerns 'logographic'
systems, for usually they include both ideographic and phonographic
(mostly syllabic) signs. Ideography deals with the level of notions,
which may or may not correspond to definite single words: an ideogram
may correspond to a space of synonyms or related nouns, or to a class
of words with the same root morpheme. So the first class of writing sys-
tems may be called logo-syllabic or morpho-syllabic. Yet the reference
of ‘logo-’ or ‘morpho-’ items is controversial.

The syllabic class also seems to be heterogeneous. Gelb distinguished
‘Aegean’ systems as a specific class using signs for open short syllables
(Gelb, 1963). These are qualified as being based on moras, so this type
was later called moraic. Another subclass includes brahmi, devanagari
and other derived systems that use specific operational techniques of
vocalization; these were qualified as alphasyllabary (Bright, 2000) or
abugida (Daniels, 2009a,b). In the Egyptian hieroglyphic script the sub-
systems of consonant ‘alphabet’ and 2-/3-consonant characters were re-
garded by Gelb as syllabic, due to the pronunciation practice. This also
allowed qualifying some other West Semitic scripts as not consonant
alphabets, but as a special type that was later named abjad (Daniels,
2009a,b).

The class of alphabets turned out to be heterogeneous as well. The
Korean alphabet with its codification of articulation in parts of charac-
ters was qualified by P. Daniels as a ‘featural’ alphabet.

So the original classification evolved into something more compli-
cated. Scholars proposed their own classification schemes with regard
to different criteria of categorization.

2. Classification of Writing Systems by H. Rogers

An important generalization was made by H. Rogers, who took into ac-
count three main dimensions of writing systems: (1) type of phonog-
raphy, (2) amount of morphography, and (3) orthographic depth. It is
represented in Scheme 1.

1. The *type of phonography* is given in the horizontal dimension of the scheme: abjad, alphabetic, abugida, moraic, syllabic.

2. The *amount of morphography* is given in the vertical dimension); ‘it is higher when there are symbols that represent the morphemes’ (e.g., <7>, <$>), or ‘when spelling distinguishes morphemes (<by>, <bye>, <buy>’).

3. *Orthographic depth*, which is greater when homophonous allomorphs are spelled similarly (*child*—*children*, *sign*—*signal*); it is denoted by the choice between uppercase and lowercase characters in the scheme.

There are five types of writing systems in this classification. The
writing systems of different languages in every type can also be charac-
terized by two gradual properties of spelling.

As can be seen in Scheme 1, some languages are located between
classes, such as Sumerian, located between moraic and syllabic writ-
ing, and Pahawh Hmong, located between alphabetic and abugida writ-
ing. Rogers assumes that there is no clear division by class, but rather
<table><caption>SCHEME 1. Rogers' generalized classification (Rogers, 2005, p. 274) (uppercase letters denote deep systems; lowercase letters, shallow ones)</caption><thead><tr><th>Abjad</th><th>Alphabetic</th><th>Abugida</th><th>Moraic</th><th>Syllabic</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>W. Semitic</td><td>Finnish<br>Greek<br>Belorusian</td><td>Pahawh<br>Hmong</td><td>Devanagāri<br>BURMESE<br>TIBETAN</td><td>Linear H<br>CHEROKEE</td><td>Modern Yi</td></tr><tr><td>Perso-Aramaic</td><td>KOREAN<br>RUSSIAN<br>SCOTS GAELIC</td><td>ENGLISH</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Egyptian</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>Mayan<br>Japanese</td><td>Chinese<br>Sumerian</td></tr></tbody></table>

a continuous space, in which some scripts cannot be clearly assigned to a specific class. This may indicate that they have properties of different classes, or that the criteria for determining them have not been developed. Rogers argues that this abstract space is a proper representation for the scheme, because many scripts are of mixed nature.

Still there arise some questions about this classification.

Why are moraic systems opposed to abjad and abugida? The nature of basic syllables may be also moraic in these systems for they have additional means to designate long vowels in a syllable—by two moras, or by 'weak consonants' as *matres lectionis* in abjad, or by distinguishing the diacritics for short and long vowels in abugida.

The definition of the amount of morphography presupposes two different cases. Is it always a matter of morphography, when semantic units are given as single signs (<7>, <%>)? Is it more convenient to speak about the amount of ideography, which can be defined by the number of ideograms? Rogers does not use the term of 'ideogram' because of its ambiguity, he rather refers to 'abstract pictograms'. Indeed, ideograms are usually opposed to pictograms, the former referring to the more elaborated type of writing than pure pictography, but these terms—'pictogram' and 'ideogram'—are not really opposed. While *pictogram* refers to *signans*, the pictorial form of a sign, *ideo-gram* presupposes its content, 'idea', *signatum*. So an ideogram can very well take the form of a pictogram, so that the opposition between them vanishes. V.A. Istrin speaks about *fraseography* in both cases, distinguishing pictograms and abstract symbols (Istrin, 1965). Nevertheless we do not refrain from using the term of 'ideogram' for a written sign; we use it for a linear sign or for a pictogram, when it refers to an abstract notion on the base of
semantic shift. In turn, the term of 'pictogram' is more appropriate for the iconic image in its literal sense (a pictogram <☉> can literally denote the sun, but as an ideogram it can have meanings such as 'light', 'day' based on a metonymic shift, or the meaning of 'majesty' through a metaphoric shift).

### 3. An Additional Categorization

Let us return to the first classification of writing systems in its widely accepted form, and develop it by adding further divisions. The logic of dividing classes presupposes binary branching on the hierarchical levels. As a result we obtain eleven subclasses, labeled by traditional or mostly representative labels; some subclasses are attested only in a single writing system example and therefore are labeled by its name.

Three traditional classes can be distinguished with respect to the type of phonography: morphosyllabic (or logosyllabic), syllabic, and alphabetic writing, each one having its own subtypes (subclasses):

(A) morphosyllabic/logosyllabic writing is mixed, with two types of graphemes: morphemes/words (semantic units) or phonetic segments of syllabic type:

(1) nonlinear systems (mixed emblematic type);

(2) linear systems (mixed linear type).

(B) Syllabic writing:

(1) primal syllabic (integral) spelling with graphemes, corresponding to syllables or phonetic segments of syllable types (CVC, CCVC, and CV, CVV, CVCV...; there may be more than one syllable in a grapheme);

(a) its complete form is represented in many ancient scripts; in the modern *lolo* writing system, more than 800 graphemes are used to represent all possible syllables (Bradley, 2009);

(b) its reduced (non-vocalized) form is given in Egyptian hieroglyphic (polyconsonantal) writing;

(2) moraic kana-type writing, with graphemes denoting indivisible phonetic syllables or segments (CV, V, -C); examples are Aegean scripts in the ancient world and kana systems in modern Japanese;

(3) moraic abugida writing with a standard subsystem of vowel modifications ($C^V$, V); examples are Indian scripts and their derivatives, as well as the Ethiopic script;

(4) moraic reduced writing, abjad: graphically non-vocalized type, but based on vocalized units in pronunciation, presupposing an indefinite vowel in syllables ($C^x$); examples are West Semitic scripts;
(C) Alphabetic writing, where the main character/letter, corresponds to a sound/phoneme:

(1) non-vocalized (reduced) writing, in which only consonants are independent graphemes (consonantic alphabet); modern Arabic;

(2) linear writing, with vowels and consonants sequentially written as equal independent graphemes (linear alphabet, also with possible diacritic differentiation); Greek, Cyrillic, Latin, Armenian, and others;

(3) nonlinear writing, with vowels and consonants written in inverted order (Pahawh Hmong is the only known example);

(4) featural nonlinear writing with graphemes constructed through elements that differentiate articulation features of phonemes (featural Korean, cf. Daniels, 1996; Lee, 2009).

Morphosyllabic nonlinear systems are the most elementary examples of information recording by means of composition of signs, as linguistic emblems (using rebus spelling). In the Aztec script such records convey only some nominations—usually place names or personal names as readable emblems.

Morphosyllabic linear systems already convey a sequence of reading signs, for words and syllables, although they may allow some violations of the linear order (for example, the ornamental arrangement of signs in Mayan spelling, or the 'honorifical' order in Egyptian spelling, or graphic blocks in Chinese). This is a general phenomenon, observed in elaborated ancient scripts. The historical morphosyllabic systems usually have a rather representative and stable class of ideograms for semantic units and a more compact class of syllable signs.

The syllabic component of morphosyllabic systems can be further analyzed with respect to the organization of pronunciation units (type of phonography). Many syllabic systems have evolved historically out of morphosyllabic in order to get adapted to different languages. Whole-syllable (integral) spelling is opposed to moraic spelling: the former uses indivisible units while the latter uses decomposed, segmental ones. Moraic systems have their own subclasses: kana, abugida and abjad. We consider abjad as a moraic system for its characters presume vocalized consonants as minimal pronunciation units, naturally used in spelling and reading.

Alphabetic systems can be complete (vocalized) or reduced (consonant). The latter are systems derived from abjad using diacritics for vocalization. Their characters are not syllables anymore because vowels have their own representations.

Linear alphabets can be based on simple characters or include characters differentiated by diacritics.

"Non-linear alphabets" are those in which the order of graphemes within a syllable is violated (while the order of syllables is linear; so
they use both linear and non-linear order): this is the case of the Pahawh script where graphemes in a syllable are displayed in reverse order, and in Korean syllable blocks. These types have unique representations.

This classification is displayed in Scheme 2.

<figure><img src="image_65.png" /><figcaption>SCHEME 2. The revised classification</figcaption></figure>

As a result we have three main classes (MORPHOSYLLABIC, SYLLABIC, ALPHABETIC) and their subclasses (EMBLEMATIC, LINEAR morphosyllabic, LOLO, EGYPTIAN, KANA, ABUGIDA, ABJAD, ALPHABET, CONSONANT ALPHABET, and also two unique “non-linear Alphabets”—PAHAWH and FEATURAL KOREAN. It should be taken into account that morphosyllabic types can be qualified as mixed systems with syllabic components (e.g., Linear B can be qualified as a morphosyllabic writing system with a kana-type syllabic component).

It can be seen that the categorization is based on four binary characteristics of spelling:

1. *linear/nonlinear spelling:* ex. g.: <1 - 2 - 3 - 4> vs. <2² - x₃>;

2. *integral (whole-syllable)/segmental (moraic) spelling:* [CCVC], [CVCVC] vs. [CV]-[CV]-[CV];

3. *complete (vocalized)/reduced (consonantic) spelling:* [CV] vs. [Cx];

4. *simple/differentiated spelling:* [CV] vs. [Cv].

These binary oppositions can operate at different levels of analysis that allow more detailed classification.

Let us examine them more carefully.
## 3.1. Linear vs. Nonlinear Spelling

Linearity is the first significant dimension of classification. Linear arrangement is an important step in the formation of phonetic writing. It follows the deployment of speech in time using one graphic dimension—on a line, be it horizontal or vertical. It is opposed to a non-linear, emblematic layout of readable graphic units which appears at the first stage of logo-/morpho-syllabic writing. Emblematic writing is in turn opposed to pictography and ideography where glyphs are non-readable signs and images, and just interpreted symbols. Linguistic (readable) emblems first appear in a pictographic frame representation for rendering names and numbers that correspond to words. While we have a single sign, the fact whether it represents a notion or a concrete word is ambiguous, be it an ideogram or a logogram. Only names can be phonetically reconstructed, and only in the case when they are represented as composition of signs with rebus spelling.

Yet readable emblems usually have reduced representations, for they allow only partial reading, using rebus spelling and omitting some elements. Their use can be observed in the Aztec codices that combine pictographic and phonographic techniques.

### 3.1.1. Aztec Emblems in the Space of Pictorial Text

The term ‘emblem’ was firstly introduced in the investigation of writing systems by H. Berlin (1958, pp. 111–119), yet not in the linguistic sense. It was used for signs designating Maya place names, which Berlin supposed to be not readable, but only requiring interpretation. Place names got their readings in the decipherment of Maya script by Ju. V. Knorozov. In Aztec manuscripts, place-name emblems are also readable signs, though they have pictorial form and are used in a pictographic context, where events are represented by iconic images. The term of ‘emblematic writing’ has been introduced in Fedorova (2009), along with the notion of *linguistic emblem*.

The use of linguistic emblems can be illustrated by examples from Codex Mendoza, an Aztec manuscript, written in 1547, edited and commented by F. Berdan (Berdan 1997). My analysis is based on the Berdan’s comments, on the *Nahuatl Grammar* by T. Sullivan (1983) and *Nahuatl Dictionary* by Rémi Siméon (1857) edited online<fnref n="1" /> by Alex Wimmer. Its first part is a chronicle.

The beginning of Codex Mendoza (Fig. 1a) is consecrated to the foundation of Tenochtitlan. It uses the stable arrangement of pictorial glyphs: the central symbol indicates the main subject of the narrative

<footnote n="1">1. Bodleian Library, Oxford UK, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fe788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00486220</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_66.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. (a) Foundation of Tenochtitlan (Codex Mendoza, 2<sup>r</sup>, fragment). (b) The conquests of Lord Itzcoatl (Codex Mendoza, 5<sup>v</sup>)</figcaption></figure>

event, the surrounding glyphs designate its participants, and the mar-
ginal frame serves for calendar emblems. The standard frame represen-
tation can convey information that may correspond to text; we may use
the term ‘textogram’ for it, following I. M. Dyakonov (1976, p. 570). Only
some emblems can be read.

The central image is an emblem of Tenochtitlan, it is composed of
three glyphs: a stone (*te-tl*), a cactus (*noch-tli*) on it (absolutive suffixes
-*tl*, -*tli*, -*li* do not participate in compounding), and an eagle in the middle
of the cactus to convey the sense ‘among’ (-*titlan*). The whole composi-
tion is based on another emblem: a shield with arrows, as a symbol of
war; it indicates the conquest of the territory. The symbolic emblem of
war is not readable (it is understood without reading), though there is a
stable binomial expression in Nahuatl, *mitl chimalli* ‘arrows, shield’, which
could correspond to it. So two root components of *Te-noch-titlan* can be
read, and the locative suffix can be reconstructed. We do not know
whether the etymology of the name should be understood as ‘a place of
cactus among stones’; more probably it refers to the name of a founder of
Tenochtitlan, Tenoch, and should be read ‘among the people of Tenoch’.
The scribe may also be using a visual image that has a readable parallel
as a rebus, so we can consider it as a linguistic emblem. The role of the
eagle is not only semantic, but primarily symbolic, for according to a
prophecy by wise men, the city was to be founded at the place where
an eagle would sit. So the scribe used iconic images with phonetic and symbolic values.

Other readable emblems are the Lords' names that are attached to the pictorial glyphs—standard images of Lords.

Another textogram example can be seen in Fig. 1b. It is dedicated to the conquests of Lord Itzcoatl. Lord Izcoatl ('snake with arrows' *coatl* 'snake', *iz-tli* 'arrow'), a name-emblem attached to his head, 'speaks' (a blue scroll as a sign of speech) about his war conquests (emblem of war—the shield and arrows), which are given in the emblems of a 'conquered city'—a burning and falling temple. Each city-emblem has an attachment that renders its name: the name's emblem. The whole can be interpreted: *Izcoatl speaks: I have conquered these cities...* It should be noted that the word for Lord *tlabtoani* literally means 'speaking' in Nahuatl, so the scroll may serve as a status indication.

### 3.1.2. Examples of Linguistic Emblems in Nahuatl

The arrangement of readable name-emblems is non-linear, it is a composition of images that can represent an imaginary scene. Here are some examples.

The emblem of CUAUH-NAUAC resembling to a "speaking tree" (Fig. 2a) represents *cuahu-itl* 'tree' + *nahua-tl* 'speech', homophone of locative suffix *nabuac* 'near'; the resulting meaning is 'near trees'.

The emblem of AHUACA-TLAN "tree with teeth" (Fig. 2b) stands for *ahuaca-tl* 'avocado' + *tlan-tli* 'teeth', homophone of locative suffix *tlan* 'where there is a lot of..., 'among...' to express the sense of 'the place, where there is a lot of avocado trees' (*TREE* and *AVOCADO* use similar glyphs, but a reader could recognize compound names). Both cases are examples of rebus substitution.

Figures 2c and d show another way of phonetic representation, using phonetic complementation, a hint given by rebus reduplication. There we have two versions of the same place-name emblem of CUA-HUAH-CAN: *cuāuh-tli* 'eagle' reduplicated by *cuahu-itl* 'tree' (Fig. 2c), or: *cua-itl* 'head' of *cuāuh-tli* 'eagle' (in one graphic image) reduplicated by *cuahu-itl* 'tree' (Fig. 2d); the next two components have no visual expression: *huah* (possessive suffix) + *can* (locative suffix); the whole designates 'the place of owners of eagles', or 'the place of eagles'. Fig. 2c shows the name-emblem attached to the symbol of burning temple that means 'conquered city', Fig. 2d represents the same name bound to the glyph *HILL* (*tepe-tl*) for 'city, settlement' (*altepe-tl*). Symbols of *BURNING TEMPLE* and *HILL* are just pictorial images, they serve as a base for linguistic emblems.

Place-name emblems usually are attached to emblems of cities or burning temples, but they can also be used independently, designating tribes or settlements in the lists of tributes.
<figure><img src="image_67.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2. (a) CUAUHNAUAC; (b) AHUACATLAN; (c) (conquered city of) CUAHUAHCAN (quaguacan); (d) (city of) CUAHUAHCAN; (e) COYUCAN; (f) ACATEPEC; (g) COYUCAC; (h) ACAMAPICHTLI</figcaption></figure>

Fig. 2e, COYU-CAN, ‘the place of (lean) coyotes’ (or COYU-HUAH-CAN ‘the place of owners of coyotes’), shows another example of phonetic complementation: *coyo-tl* ‘coyote’ with a round hole *coyoc-tli* ‘hole’ or *coyoc-tic* ‘hole ridden’; the phonetic hint confirms the meaning ‘coyote’ (not ‘dog’). The locative suffix *can* has no visual expression.

Fig. 2f, ACA-TEPE-C, with the morphemic structure: *aca-tl* ‘reed’ + *tepe-tl* ‘hill’ + *c* (locative suffix) ‘on the hill of reeds’, seems to be a direct iconic image of the name. Yet it uses a special semantic hint to confirm its reading. Its visual representation includes three components: hill (*tepetl*), reed (*acatl*) and dart (*acatl*). The glyph of hill is readable and serves also as a graphic base for other symbols. The new phonetic device is the semantic reduplication for *acatl*: it is given in two images: grass and a dart, corresponding to the meaning of *acatl*, and knowing that a dart is made using a reed’s stem. It serves to recognize the image of reed that otherwise could be understood as plain grass or an arbitrary plant. The locative suffix has no visual representation, though its meaning can be implicitly assumed from the arrangement of two small glyphs on the top of the big one (HILL).
Figs. 2g and h represent the names of the tribe COYU-CAC and of Lord ACA-MAPICH-TLI. These names are attached to images of persons. The name COYU-CAC is divided in parts in order to provide a rebus representation: *coyo-tl* ‘coyote’+ *cac-tli* ‘sandal’; this is a decomposed rebus spelling (under the hypothesis of a rebus substitution for both parts of the word). The Lord’s name probably represents its content in graphic images: *aca-tl* ‘ dart’ and *mapich-tli* ‘hand, fist’ that means ‘a fist holding darts’. It seems like a rather iconic representation, yet for the native readers these images refer to concrete words for ‘fist’ (not arm) and ‘darts’. In fact, in this name, two principles of writing coexist: ideographic, presupposing reference to a notion, and phonographic, referring to a word. We may be confident in the phonographic nature of this sign, since it is confirmed by rebus spelling; yet we may suggest that images in name-emblems were recognized by native users in their exact phonetic form, as words, because the combination of glyphs increases the chance of guessing their fixed phonetic forms corresponding to a name.

The complexity and ingenuity of Aztec script consist in the decomposition of whole names and in the use of the same glyphs for pictographic and phonographic functions.

### 3.1.3. *Graphic Arrangement of an Emblem*

The previous examples show that an Aztec linguistic emblem usually consists of two (or three) meaningful graphic components, which are sufficient for the reconstruction of the whole name.

The arrangement of readable components relies on a decision taken by the scribe. Locative suffixes can be transferred by mutual disposition of components, as in TENOCHTITLAN and ACATEPEC. The whole composition can be done in different ways: by syncretism or reduplication, incompletely or by reduplication.

<figure><img src="image_68.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. (a) MATLATLAN (Codex Mendoza). (b) MATLATLAN (Historia Tolteca Chichimeca). (c) YACAPICHTLAN (Codex Mendoza)</figcaption></figure>
Thus, the place-name 'Matla-tlan' ('net' + 'where there is a lot of...' or 'in') is given differently in the two codices: in juxtaposition of a net *matlatl* and teeth *tlantli* (Fig. 3a) or as a hill *tepetl* (non-readable base) in a net.

The place-name 'Yacapich-tlan' (*yacapitz(-abuac/-actic)* 'pointed' + *tlan* 'where there is a lot of..., together: 'the place of many pointed things') is represented as a hill with a nose, *yaca-tl* (for 'pointed') and an insect, bug *petz(o-tli)* which can bite it; the scribe's witty invention.

The logical incompatibility of images or, in the contrary, their fantas-
tic combination into an entire image, and the incompleteness of spelling
are characteristic of the graphic display of a linguistic emblem. They
presuppose 'the intuition of meaning' or 'feeling of meaning', which
J. Elkins qualifies as nesessary for understanding any sort of emblem
(Elkins, 2003).

It follows that the main writing techniques in Aztec emblems con-
sist in rebus substitution, rebus phonetic complementation (phonetic
reduplication), decomposed rebus spelling, and semantic reduplication
(semantic-phonetic analogy), when the scribe provides two parallel im-
ages corresponding to different meanings of a polysemic word (not
homonyms). The scribe may combine direct iconicity and language
game, phonetic analogy and semantic hint in a composition that cor-
responds to a compound word.

Thus we can define a linguistic emblem as a readable complex sign
with a linguistic referent. Its main properties are the function of nomi-
nation (usually proper names and place names), non-linear arrangement
of components, their limited number (usually 2-3), a new meaning of the
whole that is not just a sum of meanings of its components, and therefore
the possible incompleteness of spelling. For, as W. von Humboldt noted,
synthesis creates an entity that is not contained in any of the combining
parts. Emblems can represent signs of language, nominations, but not
speech, for they are not able to convey the strict syntactic arrangements
that are necessary for sentences.

3.1.4. *Emblems in Early Egyptian Script*

We presuppose that emblematic type of writing was proper to many an-
cient systems at the very beginning of writing. The use of emblems
can be seen, for example, in early Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions
(Fig. 4), such as the Narmer Palette and the Scorpion Mace Head (both
32nd-31st c. BC), events are narrated through iconographic pictures
while names are rendered phonetically. The name NARMER (Fig. 4a)
(presumably for king Menes) nʿr-mr ‘painful, stinging’, or ‘fierce catfish’
is rendered as a combination of two glyphs. It is given three times: be-
tween the heads of cows (goddess Hathor) and near the king’s head in
the upper sector of the palette. There are other examples of small glyphs
near the people's heads, they should be their names. There is also a "number emblem" above the captive's head: 6 lotus flowers designate 6,000 captive warriors. The name of 'Scorpion' (Fig. 4b) is given in two images in front of the king's head.

<figure><img src="image_69.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 4. (a) The Narmer Palette (32nd–31st c. BC). (b) The Scorpion mace head (32nd–31st c. BC)</figcaption></figure>

Examples of emblematic writing show that the formation of a lin-
guistic emblem occurs at the very initial stages of writing, contributing
to the allocation of simple pictorial components and their stabilization
in the phonetic function.

3.1.5. *Emblematic Techniques in Linear Scripts*

The formation of linear writing is a gradual process, and it involves not
only a fixed order of characters, but also the stabilization of their po-
sition and orientation on the line. In early examples of 'linear writing'
(that is writing on a line, be it horizontal or vertical or something else),
the sign can be rotated in different directions, i.e., it still exists as a pic-
torial image and not a written one. It acquires stable orientation when
the line obtains a fixed one-dimensional orientation in the writing space.

Stable linear writing can also use the second dimension as additional
space, combining linear elements in blocks or adding meaningful marks.
This can be seen in hieroglyphic blocks of Mayan, Chinese, or Egypt-
ian hieroglyphic, using the techniques of duplication and triplication
of characters or combination of different characters in blocks—not only
in their juxtapositions, but also including one in another; this is also
attested in the Sumerian cuneiform system. It is also represented in
abugida writing systems where the space around the invariant charac-
ter (akshara) allows the use of diacritics: superscripts, subscripts, postscripts, prescripts, and even combinations of positions.

These positions can be used not only for vowel diacritics, but also for ligatures, subscript consonants, as well for pronunciation marks (such as nasalization). In Fig. 5a,b we can see an example: the well-known mantra ‘Ō⁹ ma-ni pa-dme hūm’ in six syllable aksharas, in Devanagari and Tibetan scripts:

<figure><img src="image_70.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 5. (a) Devanagari. (b) Tibetan. (c) Korean</figcaption></figure>

The emblematic feature of ‘new meaning creation’ is proper to aksharas with vowel diacritics that acquire a new pronunciation status, which is not the sum of its components (/na/ + /i/ = /ni/, but not /nai/), and to ligatures: (/da/ + /ma/) + /e/ = /dme/).

Block writing is also characteristic of Korean, where characters form syllable blocks that follow each other in linear order as in abugidas. In Fig. 5c we can see the same mantra written in the form of six Korean blocks.

The layout of characters in blocks allows the reading of components in a well-defined order; the enigmatic nature of emblem can be perceived only through distorted visual proportions of elements that make reading difficult to non-accustomed readers.

In many alphabetic systems, diacritic marks serve for differentiation of pronunciation.

Thus, in alphabets the characters with diacritics can acquire some properties of linguistic emblems: complex structure and new sound meaning.

It should be noted that the ligatured spellings can provide new characters which are then conceived as simple (not complex) signs. Among the examples we have <&> = Latin ‘et’, <?> that originates from the vertical arrangement of abbreviation “qo” of the Latin word “quæstio,” <!> from Latin “Io,” interjection of joy. But their emblematic nature goes forth in their special reference, in opposition with the surrounding context.

## 3.2. Integral vs. Segmental Spelling

This dimension deals with the division of pronunciation units into parts in order to obtain a graphic representation. The starting point is the
word as an independent unit of speech. It may be rendered by an iconic pictogram, or by a pictogram of a homonym as a whole or by parts. This is a way to obtain a rebus representation and mixed phonetic spelling (like in Aztec emblems), as well as stable syllabic spelling.

A word (W) may be segmented differently, for example:

W = /CCVC/ = [CV]-[CVC] or [CV]-[CV]-[CV] or [CV]-[CV]-[VC], ...

W = /CVCVC/ = [CV]-[CV]-[CV] or [CV]-[CVC], ...

Natural segmentation gives a sequence of mora signs.

So we can have two types of spelling:

(1) using signs for close (and open) syllables (CVC, CCVC, CVCC, ...)—lolo-type (*syllabic*)

(2) using signs only for moras (CV, V, -C) as minimal pronunciation units in decomposing a word—kana-type (*moraic*).

It is argued that not only Japanese refers to moraic systems, but also abugida and abjad refer to the same segmental class, since they have secondary ways for conveying long vowels into the syllable.

The decomposition trend seems to be opposite to the one of emblematic combination; yet it arises from the emblematic representation of complex units and contributes to the development of phonographic writing without support of meaningful units. Both trends coexist in ancient scripts.

### 3.3. Complete vs. Reduced Spelling: Abugida and Abjad

Abugida with a standard subsystem of vowel modifications ($C^V$, V) is an example of complete vocalized writing: different vowels have different representations as independent signs or inside syllables.

Abjad is a graphically reduced, non-vocalized type, presupposing an indefinite vowel in a syllable ($C^IX$), since a consonant cannot form a syllable per se, as pronunciation unit. The inherent vowel must be inferred from the context. So while abjad characters do not form 'emblems' as such, written words may have the property of only partial sound representation that requires the 'feeling of meaning' as do emblems.

Reduced spelling is proper to Egyptian hieroglyphic writing with uniliterals $C^X$, billiters $C^XC^X$ or triliterals $C^XC^XC^X$.

Reduced systems are also consonantic alphabets, where vowels have stable diacritic forms (not always used).

In all these non-vocalized systems, a vowel is conceived as the inherent characteristic of a syllable (mora), is variable in word formation and cannot begin a syllable.

Examples of reduced spelling of another nature can be also found in Aztec emblems, where the locative suffixes of place names are often
omitted. The logographic *dongba* script is reduced, due to the absence of grammatical indexes; a similar case is probably the one of the *rongorongo* script of Easter Island (not yet deciphered).

Both trends serve to support the interests of users: complete spelling serves to readers, and reduced spelling, to writers.

### 3.4. Simple vs. Differentiated Spelling

Differentiation is an important device in the development of writing. It includes different techniques. Semantic differentiation appears in the use of graphic determiners in ancient writing systems. These are pictograms with classifying function, so they are hyperonyms to the determined units and serve to differentiate homonyms. Another sort of semantic differentiation in logographic writing, given by H. Rogers, is the use of additional minor graphic signs for specialization of meaning; it occurs in Sumerian writing, when small cuneiform strokes are drawn inside the logogram HEAD as indication for teeth, in order to express the meaning of 'mouth' (Rogers, 2005, pp. 88–89).

Phonetic differentiation presupposes the use of elements that refine the reading of a simple sign; it works already on the morphosyllabic level (as phonetic complementation), for example in Egyptian script:

$$ (n^x f^x r^x) + f^x + r^x = /nefer/ \text{'beautiful'} \quad \text{[diagram]} $$

Abugida differs from kana systems using diacritic vowel modifications of the invariant sign, whereas kana uses several invariant signs for different vocalization (Fig. 7b). Yet kana differentiates diacritics for voiced and unvoiced pairs (Fig. 7c)

<figure><img src="image_71.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 6. (a) Devanagari. (b) Japanese kana</figcaption></figure>

Alphabetic writing is the last stage of phonological analysis.

According to alphabetic principle, every phoneme, consonant or vowel must be represented by a full-formed grapheme.

Abjad writing is largely defined by the phonological, morphological, and lexical structure of classical West Semitic languages, where a vowel
is not an independent unit: it cannot start a syllable, and it is a word-
formation variable (and not a constant attribute of the root).

Alphabetic writing appears in languages in which vowels have inde-
pendent values, so that they are represented by characters equivalent in
size and position to consonant letters.

We can allow the metaphor of democracy here (with ‘gender’ sense):
vowels are hidden under yashmak in the presence of consonants in ab-
jad, they form different “garments” for consonants in abugida (some-
times they form the ‘soul’ of a consonant ‘body’ in an akshara), and, fi-
nally, the Greek claim for democracy gives them their independent sta-
tus in alphabetic text.

4. Some Concluding Comments

Thus, the main points made in this work concern:

(1) the role of linguistic emblems in the formation of phonographic
writing;

(2) the representation of the evolution of writing based on the psycho-
logically distinguishable units of speech and language, which are
fixed in written signs: the word as a semantic and phonetic unit
and the syllable (mora) as a pure pronunciation unit;

(3) the alleged moraic nature of abjad and abugida writing;

(4) the use of binary classification features (linear/nonlinear, inte-
gral/decomposed, complete/reduced, simple/differentiated spel-
ling) for developed typological schemes of writing systems.

Thanks to the four characteristics of writing systems mentioned
above, we can describe transfers from one type to another. Thus, ab-
jad differentiated by diacritics becomes a consonant-alphabet. Alpha-
bets using techniques of non-linear block spelling may be designated
as a separate type. The next step of differentiation deals with featural
Korean script.

The proposed scheme can be further detailed; some additional classi-
fication criteria, taking part in the way a writing system is functioning,
can be identified as follows:

- amount of ideography (not only of morphography),

- amount of xenography (taking into account the use of graphemes of
  foreign, different languages, xenograms, or heterograms),

- level of graphic complexity (analytic/synthetic writing, the latter
  presupposing the use of complex graphemes, cf. Fedorova, 2012),

- orthographic depth (according to Rodgers),

- level of semiotic heterogeneity (with respect not only to different
  languages, but also to graphic systems of different semiotic nature,
  cf. Perri, 2014).
These dimensions of writing need special investigation. Only a few comments can be made. Thus, modern devices allow using different sorts of icons along with written words; this is a case of mixed writing. The use of emoticons becomes common for informal communication all over the world, for they give expressive images of emotions, as in these Japanese examples:

(^~)! (*0*) \(~_~)/

Another case of mixed writing happens in the simultaneous use of Latin and Cyrillic (or another national) writing signs; it is often a result of contacts of languages and of their writing systems (ibid.).

Let us also mention a particular language game, using number codes. This method occurs widely in advertisements and informal Internet communication. Here are examples of this kind of “numeric codification,” in Chinese phrases:

886 /bā bā liù/ = 拜拜了 /bàibài le/ ‘Bye-bye’

768 /qī liù bā/ = 吃了吧 /chī le ba/ ‘Let’s go eat’!

Multilingual and multiscript texts on bill-boards are common practice in modern cities, forming their linguistic landscape.

The contrast between the writer's and the reader's interest, contribute to the development of writing. It may not be so much about evolution as about writing improvement. Different forms of writing coexist in the modern world, addressing different needs: speed, exactness of speech transfer, the best visual presentation of content or just of its form... Writing can serve not only for distributing information, but also to conceal it; it can be a means of magic, or play, of expressiveness, or of decoration. But all of these mixed forms and techniques can exist only as deviations of existing standard writing systems or as graphic games taking advantage of the creative potential of the art of writing.

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* Berdan, Frances F. and Patricia Rieff Anawalt (1997). "Graphic Conventions of the Codex Mendoza." In: *The Essential Codex Mendoza*. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 93–102.

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# The Naasioi Otomaung Alphabet
of Bougainville

## A Preliminary Sketch From Afar

Piers Kelly

*Abstract.* The Naasioi Otomaung alphabet first came to light during the Bougainville Crisis of 1988–1998. Created by the Naasioi-speaking leader of a politico-religious movement in Kieta district, its emergence follows the pattern of numerous other scripts of Asia and the Pacific that have developed in recent times in the context of anti-colonial confrontations (Kelly, 2016; 2018a). This paper provides the first ever public report on the form, structure and context of the script, early efforts at documentation, and its prospects for future development. The script exhibits a formal influence from cursivised Roman while its inventory of letters presents as a cypher for the English alphabet, including letters such as <x> and <z> that are not present in standard Naasioi orthographies (Hurd and Hurd, 1966). From the perspective of its users, however, the alphabet is designed to universally encode any language: the word *otomaung* is in fact a neologism roughly meaning ‘able to express anything’. The term is also polysemyous, variously denoting the letter <A>, as well as the religious community in which the alphabet was created. The forms of the letters, meanwhile, are said to have been inspired by ceremonial scarring, a practice that is now rare. reproducing these forms in writing is thus seen as an act of cultural preservation by other means. Although at one time the script became part of a local school curriculum, literacy is now limited to a small number of individuals. Systematic documentation and description of Naasioi Otomaung has suffered various setbacks, from political disruptions to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, most of the documentation to date has been carried out by post, email, and social media correspondence. Despite the obvious limitations and inefficiencies of these channels, ‘virtual’ fieldwork has been unexpectedly productive, resulting in an accurate record of the script, preliminary information about its historical and ethnographic circumstances and the development of a new font. With Bougainville’s recent advances towards political independence, the Otomaung Naasioi alphabet may soon rise to greater prominence.

In this paper I partially describe the Naasioi Otomaung, a recently devised script of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. In broad terms I outline its formal and typological features as

<footnote>Piers Kelly ID 0000-0002-6467-2338
Department of Archaeology, Classics and History Rm 308, C02 Building
University of New England, Armidale NSW 2351, Australia
E-mail: pkelly26@une.edu.au</footnote>
well as its history and ethnographic context. On account of local polit-
ical disruptions and the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face fieldwork in
the Naasioi-speaking region of Bougainville has not yet been feasible.
Nonetheless, with the aid of mobile phone calls, email and especially
social media I have recorded foundational information on the history,
ethnographic context, formal properties, structure and uses of this new
script. Thus, in addition to providing primary documentation and de-
scription, this paper is intended to demonstrate that digitally mediated
fieldwork can produce surprisingly rich results. In turn, it is my hope
that this preliminary work on the Naasioi Otomaung alphabet will serve
as a secure basis for future ethnography based on face-to-face partici-
pant observation in the field.

Motivation

Primary writing systems, and their derivatives, have always been a
major focus of attention for palaeographers and grapholinguists. The
analysis of these systems has generated insight into the origins and evo-
lution of writing, permitted the diachronic reconstruction of script lin-
eages, and set the parameters for establishing grapholinguistic typolo-
gies. Secondary scripts that have been deliberately devised in recent
times have received less attention, perhaps because they do not seem to
offer any imposing insights into the nature of writing. I have argued,
however, that there is much to learn from secondary scripts, especially
those that have been invented within small-scale, non-state societies in
the context of recent colonial contact (Kelly, 2018a,b). The Cherokee
and Vai scripts are well-known examples of this phenomenon but many
others have also been documented and analysed.

Like all good objects of anthropological enquiry secondary scripts
are self-evidently diverse while having surprising features in common.
This diversity-universality axis can be approached in a straightforward
grapholinguistic mode that attempts to describe and compare formal
and systemic characteristics. However, by adopting wider perspective
afforded by the anthropology of literacy paradigm, we can also attend
critically to the historical determinants and political contexts of these
scripts, as well as the various functions that they serve, and the cultural
meanings that their users ascribe to them.

My research to date has focused on West Africa and Southeast Asia,
two regions in which a bewildering array of new scripts have been in-
vented within non-state societies over the past two centuries. Certain
scripts such as the N'ko script of the Côte d'Ivoire and the Kayah Li
script of Thailand-Myanmar have large communities of contemporary
users. Others such as the Bagam script of Cameroon and the Sulit Air
script of Indonesia are known from only a few fragmentary manuscripts.
Others still, including Pa Chay script of Vietnam and Pahawh Khmu'
script of Laos have no surviving inscriptions and are recalled only in oral histories. Individual inventors in these two regions continue to develop secondary scripts, while every year scholars unearth more that have been overlooked in informal archives. Needless to say, the documentation of secondary scripts is far from complete.

Despite the growth of anthropological scholarship in this arena, with the important work of Cécile Guillaume-Pey, Konrad Tuchscherer, Carmen Brandt and others, I have often encountered resistance to their study. In conversation, some colleagues have expressed the view that they are not ‘real’ scripts, and that there are endangered scripts and languages that deserve more documentary attention from researchers. Others have pointed out that recent secondary scripts are rarely successful, especially if success is measured by the extent of the diffusion of the script and its transmission over multiple generations. Another objection is that the scripts themselves are often structurally cumbersome and that they simply add a distraction to the more important goals of orthography development for minority languages, and ultimately literacy in these languages.

On the whole, these objections are premised on utilitarian concerns and on implicit hierarchies of value where the relevant parameters of interest are the age of the scripts, their degree of ‘naturalness’ or ‘authenticity’, and their structural efficiency vis-à-vis the languages they are intended to represent. If such values and concerns are universally held, then we can register these objections as perfectly legitimate. However, numerous studies of literacy ideologies, of which Brian Street’s contribution (Street, 1984) is most well recognised, demonstrate that such values are very much culturally and historically positioned and require ethnographic explanation in their own right.

From my perspective, new scripts deserve grapholinguistic and anthropological attention for the additional reason that they offer a rare insight into the diversity of human symbolic culture. At the same time, they can help us perceive what is *undiverse* about the way we do things with graphic codes in terms of both the ‘obvious’ and non-obvious solutions and processes that we often converge upon to address common problems. Moreover, small-scale or non-state societies are ideal sites for investigating written practice on the basis of the fact that they represent locations where writing, of any kind, has been a relatively recent introduction. Consequently, normative literacy attitudes have not yet had a chance to become hegemonic in the same way that they have in the West, where it is no longer possible to participate fully in society unless you are literate.

## Diversity and Universality of Secondary Scripts

Three brief examples suffice to provide a glimpse into the diversity of new scripts. The Bamum script of Cameroon (developed between 1896
and 1910) includes a semantic determinative for distinguishing homo-
phones (Dugast and Jeffreys, 1950). The homophonous lexeme that is
marked with the determinative is the one with the meaning that seen to
carry more prestige (Fig. 1).

<figure><img src="image_72.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Homophonous terms in the Bamum language distinguished in writing with a semantic determinative (Dugast and Jeffreys, 1950, p. 7)</figcaption></figure>

The Western Apache script was designed as a prompt for the recita-
tion of prayers and it includes signs designed to specify the correct rit-
ual gestures that accompany the speech (Fig. 2). These so-called kinetic
signs are generated as compounds of the speech signs meaning that it
requires deep insider knowledge to be able to read and reproduce the
script.

<figure><img src="image_73.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2. Western Apache script (Basso and Anderson, 1977, p. 232)</figcaption></figure>

Finally, the Sayaboury script of Laos includes signs for signalling vo-
cal noises such as chanting and calling animals (Fig. 3).

These three examples draw attention to the fact that culturally spe-
cific, non-phonographic and even non-linguistic information can be en-
coded in graphic form, a fact which presupposes that in order to learn
and use the script effectively one must also be a competent participant
in that society. These examples are not provided merely to draw atten-
tion to interesting or quirky outliers. Rather, they are sharp illustra-
tions of the fact that writing of any kind is culturally loaded, and that it
<figure><img src="image_74.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. Sample of the Sayaboury script (Smalley and Wimuttikosol, 1998, p. 115)</figcaption></figure>

is never a neutral or autonomous mechanism for representing language (Bartlett, Lopéz, Vasudevan, and Warriner, 2011). It is by stepping outside of our own literacy context we can acquire a better appreciation for the inherent relativity of scripts.

Having made the case for relativism it is also possible to make productive generalisations about the ways that secondary writing systems emerge and evolve. New scripts, especially those invented by non-literates, seem to exhibit high visual complexity or iconicity, have no contrast in reverse or rotated images, and to become compressed over multiple transmissions. They are also often morpheme-centric with a preference for representing syllables and consonants as opposed to individual vowels, and to make use of rebuses and semantic determinatives. More research is needed in order to ascertain their convergent techniques for modelling language, and the extent to which their dynamics may coincide with those of primary scripts.

## The Linguistic Context of the Naasioi Otomaung Alphabet

A very recent secondary script that has not yet been formally documented is the Naasioi Otomaung alphabet from the island Bougainville. I was first told of the existence of this alphabet by the Bougainvillean linguist Ruth Spriggs, but have never had the opportunity to investigate it in person. The COVID-19 pandemic has been the most formidable obstacle to research, but it also had the effect of liberating me from any expectation—and guilt—that face-to-face fieldwork was at all possible. My preliminary documentation, offered here, is the result of mobile phone calls, social media interactions and generous work performed at my direction by intermediaries already on the ground including missionaries and linguists.

Despite its small geographic size, Bougainville is very linguistically and culturally diverse. The coastal languages marked with a star on the map below are Austronesian and the mostly inland languages marked in
grey are Papuan. This is a contrast that still reflects the earlier coloni-
sation of Bougainville by Austronesians some three thousand years ago.

<figure><img src="image_75.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 4. The languages of Bougainville (Tryon, 2015, p. 32)</figcaption></figure>

Rotokas, a Papuan language of Bougainville spoken by an estimated
4,320 people, is famous for having what is claimed to be the smallest
sound inventory in the world, with only 11 contrastive phonemes. The
efficiency of the Rotokas sound system has even inspired the invention