Myths about Writing Systems in Speech & Language Technology (2023)

Abstract: Natural language processing is largely focused on written text processing. However, many computational linguists tacitly endorse myths about the nature of writing. We highlight two of these myths—the conflation of language and writing, and the notion that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing is ideographic—and suggest how the community can dispel them.

## introduction for a variety of historical and sociological reasons, natural language processing usually denotes the processing of written text, with work on spoken and signed language-as well as "multimodal" research-largely consigned to other venues. this largely unacknowledged focus on written language affects how computational linguists understand the nature of language itself. in this position paper, we argue that the field of natural language processing is beholden to certain misconceptions about the nature of writing and its relationship to other forms of language. we then make concrete suggestions as to how authors and editors can respond to these myths. we recognize that at least some of the issues we discuss may be obvious to the reader. if that is the case, we beg the reader's forgiveness. however, we think what we have to say here needs to be said. ## writing as a technology human language is notoriously hard to define, but we adopt a standard "cognitive" definition: the ability to learn and use systems of conventionalized externalized mental propositions. this ability is acquired, more or less effortlessly, by all typically developing humans barring gross sensory or motor impairments, and evolved sometime in the early prehistory of man. writing, in contrast, is not a cognitive ability per se, but rather a technology which allows for the creation of durable visible records of language @xcite . use of this technology can only be mastered by conscious, determined study 1 and has developed independently only a few times-in mesopotamia and egypt, china, and central america-and in each case represents the dawn of human history in that region. a writing system is, at its base, a linguistic analysis of the language it is used to write. (indeed, the scribes of ancient mesopotamia and egypt are history's first linguists.) these analyses may seem quite naïve to the trained linguist, but the design of even the earliest writing systems hinge on sophisticated insights that presage the comparatively recent discoveries of the phoneme, mora, and morpheme. 2 for this reason, typologies of writing systems (e.g., @xcite are largely oriented around what types of linguistic units underlie the writing system's analysis. ## conflation and confusion language and writing may be ontologically incommensurate objects, but all known forms of writing are parasitic on spoken language. this is contrary to standard language ideologies (in the sense of lippi-green, 1997) which tend 1 see, for example, @xcite for an in-depth discussion of how parts of the brain which evolved for other purposes are co-opted in reading. nlp researchers commonly conflate a language and the writing system(s) used to write it. consider the following quotations, all taken from papers hosted on the acl anthology. since persian is a right-to-left lan-guage… however, there is nothing about the languages themselves that is right-to-left. furthermore, note that in unicode, the right-toleft property of these scripts is purely an issue for text entry and rendering engines, since the codepoints are in the same logical order as text written left-to-right. one more idiosyncrasy of the arabic language is that it is a consonantal language… one does not ordinarily indicate short vowels in arabic, except in certain pedagogical and religious texts. while the templatic word formation processes in semitic languages might make them uniquely suited for this type of "defective" writing, many languages which lack this property-including persian, urdu, and until 1928, turkish-are or were written using an arabic-based consonantal script without great difficulty. this alone shows that there is nothing particularly "consonantal" about the arabic language. chinese finally, one can find a number of conflicting statements about the nature of chinese in the acl anthology. chinese is a morphemic language. chinese is a logographic language… …chinese is ideographic it's well known that chinese is an ideographic language… …chinese, japanese and other ideographic languages. we now turn to the question of what kind of writing system chinese really is. ## ideography and cjk we acknowledge that there exist many symbol systems which are purely ideographic (or semasiographic), without any direct reference to spoken language @xcite . however, defrancis (1989, ch. 2) shows that these fail to satisfy any reasonable definition of writing. there have also been heroic attempts to develop purely ideographic writing systems, most notably blissymbolics @xcite . while carefully designed, such systems struggle with encoding categories like: dependency on spoken language appears to be inherent to the design of writing. despite this, it is very common to find statements in the literature that suggest that some writing systems, especially those used for chinese, japanese, or korean, are ideographic. we demonstrate this with a survey of the literature in subsection 4.4, but first we present a brief synopsis of how chinese, japanese and korean writing actually work. ## conclusions we have shown that researchers in speech and language processing frequently conflate writing and language, a mistake that is often accompanied by misunderstandings about the nature of writing itself or misinformation about the nature of specific writing systems. we recognize that many researchers may lack the necessary background in writing systems, and this is unsurprising given that the history and structure of writing is not widely taught, at least at north american universities. for researchers who wish to learn more about writing systems, we recommend two texts: @xcite provides an accessible introduction to the typology of writing sys-tems, and @xcite gives an easyto-read introduction to the history of writing. editors and reviewers should pay more attention the use of inappropriate terminology used to describe writing systems as a simple matter of scientific communication. describing the arabic and chinese languages as rightto-left or ideographic wrongly conflates of writing and language; these are the sort of mistakes that simply should not be made by specialists in our field. we conclude with one concrete suggestion: we recommend the unicode consortium remove incorrect uses of the term ideograph in the standard (unicode consortium, 2021). as the they admit in their faq on cjk languages, this term does not accurately reflect the nature of these characters, but they claim the "term is now so pervasive in the standard that it cannot be abandoned or replaced." 7 however, we submit that the standard's description of han characters as cjk unified ideographs is perhaps the primary channel by which the myth has been propagated amongst technologists, and a correction and mea culpa would do much to publicize the issue and dispel this myth. @xcite , for instance, proposes the term sinographs, and there are other sensible alternatives.