Written Language: General Problems and Problems of English 9783110803860, 9789027924353

Table of contents :
1. The Pre-Functionalist Views of Written Language
2. The Functionalist Approach to Written Language
3. Some Consequences of the Functionalist Approach
4. The Structural Correspondences of the Two Language Norms
5. The Functionalist Approach Again: Some Voices pro et contra
6. Some Remarks on the Written Norm as a Factor in Language Development
7. Some Characteristic Features of the Written Norm of English
8. Problems of the Orthographic Reform of English
9. Conclusion
10. Bibliography
11. Indices
11. 1 Index of names
11. 2 Subject index

Citation preview

JANUA

LINGUARUM

STUDIA MEMORIAE NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA Series Critica, 14 edenda curai WERNER WINTER

WRITTEN LANGUAGE General problems and problems of English

by JOSEF VACHEK

1973 MOUTON THE HAGUE . PARIS

© Copyright 1973 Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent.

PREFACE

When, some thirteen years ago, the present writer was preparing for print his rather lengthy paper, "Two Chapters on Written English" (VACHEK 1959), he earnestly believed that this was his last word on the subject he had followed, at that time, for some twenty-five years. However, during the decade that followed the publication of the said paper, the problems of written language were to prove so attractive to many students of language both in Europe and outside it that the survey of the problems that had been adequate in 1959 was becoming slowly but surely rather antiquated, even if the basic approach of the present author to the main problems could have remained virtually unchanged. Still, the formulation of those problems can now, after the said decade, be more precise and, profiting by some new arguments that were brought up both by the supporters and by the opponents of the importance of written language, the theoretical groundwork can now be presented much more adequately than before. For these reasons, the present writer could not very well refuse the flattering invitation by Professor Werner Winter to contribute a booklet on the problems of Written Language to the newly founded Series Critica. It may not be too immodest to hope that the summarizing survey of the approaches to the involved problems will at least arouse the interest of those linguists who have so far not considered the given issue worth investigating. Prague, April 1971

J. V .

CONTENTS

1. The Pre-Functionalist Views of Written Language . .

9

2. The Functionalist Approach to Written Language . .

14

3. Some Consequences of the Functionalist Approach .

18

4. The Structural Correspondences of the Two Language Norms

21

5. The Functionalist Approach Again: Some Voices pro et contra

27

6. Some Remarks on the Written Norm as a Factor in Language Development

40

7. Some Characteristic Features of the Written Norm of English

49

8. Problems of the Orthographic Reform of E n g l i s h . . .

57

9. Conclusion

69

10. Bibliography

71

11. Indices

78

11. 1 Index of names

78

11. 2 Subject index

79

1 THE PRE-FUNCTIONALIST VIEWS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE

By the term written language we mean, tentatively, the system of graphical1 means employed for the purpose of producing written utterances acceptable in the given language community. Such means include not only the graphemes (implemented by letters), but also the diacritical marks, sharing with their graphemes their segmental places in the written utterances, as well as the established ways of mutually combining those graphemes (the laws governing this combination of graphemes are sometimes referred to as rules of graphotactics). We speak here deliberately of a system, not a mere inventory, of such means: each grapheme belonging to that system is mainly characterized by being different from the other graphemes of that system. At the same time, the rules governing the use of these graphemes (including the graphotactic rules) in the given language community have clearly a normative character within that community, and any use contrary to these rules is felt as contrary to the norm and evaluated either as a mistake or, in some specific circumstances, as a case of intentional deviation, prompted by some functional motive (see, e.g., the abandonment of punctuation in modern poetry, the use of small letters instead of capitals in modern graphic art, etc.). It is rather symptomatic that the latter half of the nineteenth century, as well as the first three decades of the twentieth, showed very little understanding for written language viewed as a system "in its own right" (at least, partially so). The very term written 1

The term written as used here includes also 'printed'; analogously, graphical should be understood as including 'typographic' as well (cf. footnote 4).

10

THE PRE-FUNCTIONALIST VIEWS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE

language is hardly ever found in the linguistic books and papers of those periods — the terms usually met with are writing (Schrift, écriture), and even spelling: the use of both is regrettable because they approach the given issues from an altogether different angle, as will be shown further below. The dominating idea of linguistics in the said period is the absolute supremacy (one might say, "linguistic legitimacy") of the spoken language and of the acoustic make-up of spoken utterances. The era of flourishing research in phonetics (mainly the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries) could not but look down upon the "unphonetic rendering" of the sentences of a language by means of what was generally called the "conventional spelling" to which one opposed the "scientifically exact" phonetic transcription. In view of all this, one can hardly be surprised to find in (1916) a categorical statement to the effect that the only raison d'être of "writing" (écriture) is to "represent language", i.e. to serve as a means of putting down spoken utterances. 2 The "written word" is even accused of "usurping the principal part" which should be played by the spoken word; SAUSSURE vigorously protests against the formulations saying that a written letter is "pronounced" in this or that way, while in fact it is the spoken sound which is written so and so (SAUSSURE 1916: 52). SAUSSURE'S standpoint just registered here was not a matter of his personal opinion only. On the contrary, it may be taken to be typical of most of his contemporaries and predecessors, and even of the scholars of the following two or three generations. How allpervading this kind of approach was can be demonstrated by quoting one of the most enlightened American linguists of the period between the wars, Edward SAPIR, who qualifies written language as a "point-to-point equivalence [...] to its spoken counterpart" and expressly describes "written forms" as "secondary symbols of the spoken ones", even if he admits that the written forms may SAUSSURE

2

"Langue et écriture sont deux systèmes de signes distincts ; l'unique raison d'être de second est de représenter le premier" (SAUSSURE 1916:45).

THE PRE-FUNCTIONALIST VIEWS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE

11

not only in theory but in the actual practice of certain eye-readers [...] be entirely substituted for the spoken ones (SAPIR 1 9 2 1 : 19). Still, "the auditory-motor associations" are said to be probably always latent at the least, that is, they are unconsciously brought into play (SAPIR 1 9 2 1 : 19). Much less cautious, and much more outspoken, is, of course, the standpoint of the father of modern American descriptive linguistics, Leonard BLOOMFIELD who insists on the fact that writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks (BLOOMFIELD 1 9 3 3 : 21), and later on, speaks of the "imperfections of traditional writing" (BLOOMFIELD 1933: 86). Six years later, BLOOMFIELD was to find still harder language on this point: The popular-scholastic contrast of 'spoken language' and 'written language' is entirely misleading, because writing is merely "a device for recording language by visual marks", and because writing has been practiced in only few communities, and in these, until recently, almost always as a special skill of a few people (BLOOMFIELD 1 9 3 9 : 6).

This view was to become, for a long time to come, part and parcel of American linguistic ideology. Even as late as 1958, Charles F. HOCKETT is opposed to the use of the terms spoken language and written language; he qualifies them as "laymen's terms" which wrongly suggest that speech and writing are merely two different manifestations of something fundamentally the same (HOCKETT 1 9 5 8 : 4 ) ; he, too, is convinced of the incomparably superior status of spoken utterances which alone reflect language in its entirety. Four scholars representing three different generations of linguists have been quoted here, and many others of equal reputation might easily be added to the list. On the other hand, in surveying the literature concerned with the problems of writing and spelling of

12

THE PRE-FUNCTIONALIST VIEWS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE

concrete languages, one cannot overlook the fact that a number of observers did keenly realize that some of the "unphonetic features" of written utterances, thought to be grossly misrepresenting the structure of the given language, may claim some justification. Non-traditional was already the standpoint of the Polish scholar Jan BAUDOUIN DE COURTENAY who compared the graphical inventories of various Slavonic languages in themselves and characterized each of them in terms of some specific features characteristic of each of the compared languages (BAUDOUIN DE COURTENAY 1881). From his comparison he drew the conclusion that in these terms any Slavonic context of some length may be identified as written in this or that language, and that identification of this kind may be carried through even by a person wholly ignorant of the language concerned, purely on the basis of the external, formal appearance of the analysed context. BAUDOUIN's remarks are remarkable for the ability of their author to consider written utterances as structures of their own kind; on the other hand, they suffer from neglect both of the content of the examined utterances and of their relation to the phonically implemented spoken utterances corresponding to them. Such a confrontation of spelling and phonetics was to be effected some two decades later by other scholars. Thus, e.g., Henry BRADLEY, for all his disapproval of the modern "unphonetic spelling" of English, admitted that this spelling can claim the merit of saving written English from a good many of the ambiguities of the spoken tongue (BRADLEY 1904: 214). He referred there to the well-known spelling differentiations of homophones like right — rite — wright — write, differentiations which enable the reader to identify the given denotatum directly, whereas the spoken equivalents of the four words, all of which sound [rait], can only be differentiated semantically with reference to the contexts in which they occur. — An analogous merit of Czech spelling was pointed out, independently of BRADLEY, by the Czech phonetician Antonin FRINTA, who even attempted to define the function of spelling in the life of the linguistic community. This function, in his view, is

THE PRE-FUNCTIONALIST VIEWS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE

13

in a way, to speak quickly and distinctly to the eyes, so that the proper idea can be mobilized without any difficulty (FRINTA 1 9 0 9 : 36). As will be shown below, the functionalist standpoint, tentatively indicated more than six decades ago by FRINTA, can indeed yield a clue leading to an adequate assessment of the mutual relationship of spoken and written language. Unfortunately, FRINTA was never to fully develop his sound functionalist standpoint, as his main interest was to remain that of a phonetician, not that of a general theoretician of language.

2 THE FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH TO WRITTEN LANGUAGE

A momentous step giving a foretaste of the functionalist approach to the problem of the status of written language was made, more than two decades after FRINTA, by an early member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, the Ukrainian linguist Agenor ARTYMOVYC. In two of his papers (ARTYMOVYC 1932a, 1932b) he claims for written language a status to a degree independent of that of spoken language. In conscious opposition to SAUSSURE he points out that there are indeed people for whom the written utterances, not the spoken ones, constitute the primary fact of language (those, that is, who can read texts of a foreign language without being able to speak it). Further, he convincingly argues that in any language there are many learned words which even the native speakers know in their written forms rather than in the spoken ones, etc. Not even ARTYMOVYS, however, for all the acuteness of his concrete observations, attempted to work out a general linguistic framework within which both the spoken and the written language could find their adequate places. An attempt at the establishment of such a framework was to be undertaken, after another decade, by the Danish scholar H. J. ULDALL. In conformity with the general principles of the glossematic theory (of which he was one of the most prominent followers) ULDALL (1944) sees the difference of speech and "writing" as one of mere substance: The system of speech and the system of writing are [...] only two realizations out of an infinite number of possible systems, of which no one can be said to be more fundamental than any other. (ULDALL 1944: 16)

THE FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH TO WRITTEN LANGUAGE

15

However, the highly original conception of the prematurely deceased Danish scholar suffers from an obvious lack of due perspective in which the two language systems are to be viewed and which cannot be obtained from the differences of the two substances alone (especially if these differences are handled so slightingly as was done in ULDALL'S paper). Such due perspective can only be obtained by introducing into our examination the functional consideration, in other words, by trying to find out the functional justification of the existence of written language alongside of spoken language. An attempt at the establishment of such a functionalist 3 frame of reference had been made, five years before U L D ALL'S paper was published, by the present writer (VACHEK 1939). In that paper (and subsequently in VACHEK 1959) he approached the problems of written language from a consistently functionalist angle. As his starting point he singled out the obviously normative character of written language, to which all concrete written utterances in a given community have to conform, just as spoken utterances have to conform to the rules laid down by the norm of the spoken language. In the 1959 version of his theory, the present writer drew further consequences from this fact; from then on, he has preferred the terms the spoken norm of language and the written norm of language to the earlier ones spoken language and written language, and in the following chapters we will also be using the former pair of terms. The co-existence, in one and the same language, of two language norms, the spoken and the written, faces the examiner with some other problems. The most important of them is what functional justification each of the two may have within the community. The present writer hopes to have answered this question by his definitions of the spoken and written norm of language. In principle, the definitions were formulated as early as in 1939, and their improved version, dating from 1959, is given here below: The SPOKEN NORM of language is a system of phonically manifestable 3

Admittedly, ULDALL also formulates his own conception in functionalist terms, but he understands function rather in the mathematical sense than as referring to purposeful communication.

16

THE F U N C T I O N A L I S T A P P R O A C H TO W R I T T E N L A N G U A G E

language elements whose function is to react to a given stimulus (which, as a rule, is an urgent one) in a dynamic way, i.e. in a ready and immediate manner, duly expressing not only the purely communicative but also the emotional aspect of the approach of the reacting language user. The WRITTEN NORM of language is a system of graphically manifestable language elements whose function is to react to a given stimulus (which, as a rule, is not an urgent one) in a static way, i.e. in a preservable and easily surveyable manner, concentrating particularly on the purely communicative aspect of the approach of the reacting language user. (VACHEK 1 9 5 9 ) 4

The above definitions show that the written norm of language has its functional justification alongside the spoken norm: in some specific situations the former can serve the communicative needs of the members of a community better than the latter (and, of course, vice versa in other specific situations). From the definitions one can also deduce some important logical consequences. First, the two norms appear to be functionally complementary: as already noted, in each of the situations in which the member of the community may be placed, one of the two will be found much more appropriate to use than the other. Second, any language user belonging to a cultured language community should have an equally good command of both norms of the language concerned, because only then he will be able to exploit the systemic possibilities of his language to the full. It should also be noted that the situations for which the use of the written norm appears specifically indicated have always something specialized about them, and very frequently such use serves higher cultural and/or civilizational purposes and functions (use in literature, research work, state administration, etc.). All this, in the present writer's opinion, amounts to the characterization of the 4

In principle, the latter definition also covers what is popularly called printed language, if the term graphically is replaced by typographically. The specific qualities of printed utterances were discussed in VACHEK (1948): printed language is characterized there as "an intensified variant of the written language in which most of the features characteristic of written language have been pushed to the extreme" (Vachek 1948: 71). This refers mainly to the depersonalized character of the printed utterance which, unlike its written analogue, does not enable the reader to identify the author of the utterance from the material make-up of the latter alone.

THE FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH TO WRITTEN LANGUAGE

17

written norm as the marked member of an opposition whose unmarked member is the corresponding spoken norm. Incidentally, it should be noted that the use of the written norm for higher cultural and civilizational tasks definitely disproves the often asserted inferior status of written utterances as opposed to their spoken couterparts. On the contrary, the said use of the written norm can be regarded as safe evidence of its specific status, characterized by considerable autonomy. Another objection often adduced to disprove this autonomous linguistic status of the written norm (and already touched upon above) argues that the large majority of the language communities of the world still lack written utterances (and thus also the written norm underlying them). (See, e.g., BLOOMFIELD'S arguments of 1 9 3 9 ; they can be found reiterated in HOCKETT 1 9 6 3 . ) It is alleged that the dispensability of written utterances, proved by such absence, should be taken as proof of their accidental, structurally nonessential status. Such an objection, however, must be called erroneous. The situation in the communities still lacking the written utterances (and the written norms), though found in the majority of existing cases, cannot be taken for normal or even for typical: in such communities — the number of which, in any case, is constantly diminishing — one has not yet made full use of the latent possibilities of language. And unquestionably the goal to which language development has been directed in any community is the highest possible efficiency of lingual communication and the maximum development of its functional range. Thus, even if written utterances (and norms) certainly cannot be classified as language universals, their structural importance is by no means impaired thereby — in the present writer's opinion, language "optimals" should not rank lower in importance to language universals, even if most of the theoreticians of language have not yet realized this fact.

3 SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH

The functionalist framework that was briefly outlined in the preceding chapter can claim another merit — it can help define more adequately some terms that have often been employed rather vaguely in linguistic literature dealing with our problems. One such term is that of orthography, often alternating with spelling, and treated more or less as its synonym. From what has been said here above it is perfectly clear that neither of these terms can be regarded as synonymous with the above-established term of the written norm of language. Orthography is, in fact, a set of rules enabling the language user to transpose the spoken utterances into the corresponding written ones, in other words, it is a kind of bridge leading from the spoken norm of language to the written. (An analogous bridge, leading in the opposite direction, is the "pronunciation", enabling the language user to transpose the written utterances into the corresponding spoken ones.) The term spelling, in its turn, used in its narrower, more specialized sense, denotes another important device: it serves to express the material make-up of the written utterance by phonic means, i.e. by successively naming each of the graphemes composing that utterance (in this sense one speaks in English of "spelling the difficult words"). It may come rather as a surprise to find that the phonic transcription is, in fact, the exact counterpart of spelling: it serves to express the material make-up of the spoken utterance by graphical means, i.e. by successively registering in writing each of the sounds composing the acoustic implementation of that utterance. It will be easily seen that, contrary to the established belief, the

SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH

19

phonetic transcription does not belong to the domain of the written norm, but to that of the spoken — transcribed utterances present the acoustic make-up of the utterances projected on paper (just as the "spelling" of a written utterance presents its graphical make-up projected into sound, and so belongs to the domain of the written language). The above fine distinctions, established by the present writer more than a quarter of a century ago (cf. VACHEK 1945), if thought out consistently, will not only enable the linguist to draw a distinct line between written utterances and phonetically transcribed utterances, but also to realize the absolute unfeasibility of the project, at the beginning of this century so dearly cherished by some phoneticians, of replacing all conventional writing systems of natural languages by the "scientifically accurate" phonetic transcription. 5 The instances of the graphical differentiation of homophones (such as that of right — rite — wright — write, adduced by BRADLEY) in written utterances, opposed to their non-differentiated counterparts (such as [rait]) in the phonetic transcription, are apt to reveal the advantages of the conventional ways of writing: while the written forms in themselves are capable to mobilize very quickly the idea referred to, the transcribed forms must be first "projected into sound" and, apart from this, as already noted above, deciphered within the whole spoken context in which they appear. It is in this sense that FRINTA'S acute observation of the task of orthography (more exactly, of written utterances) "to speak quickly and distinctly to the eyes" (FRINTA 1 9 0 9 : 36) must be interpreted. Thus the conceptual framework discussed, pointing out the coexistence in cultured language communities of two norms of 5 Admittedly, this prospect was one of those which induced the founders of the International Phonetic Association, in the eighteen-eighties, to print Le maître phonétique, its representative organ, not in conventional orthographies but in phonetic transcription. If in 1970 the Association decided to give up, for the greatest part, this long-established practice, and to replace this journal by another, it may be regarded, among other things, also as a symptom of a profound change of view on the part played, and to be played, by phonetic transcription both in general linguistics and in the practice of everyday life.

20

SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH

language, the spoken and the written, can throw some new light on the vexing problem of the adequacy (or inadequacy) of the existing orthographic systems. The natural corollary of the said coexistence is, of course, the coexistence of the two norms in the linguistic consciousness of the speakers of language who not only can use the means supplied both by the one and by the other, but who also must be able to switch over from the one to the other if the change of situation in which the language user is placed demands this. William HAAS speaks, in this connection, about the intralingual phonographic translation in the course of which the spoken utterances are transposed into the corresponding written ones (HAAS 1970: 17-22); by many of its features this process parallels the interlingual translation effected between different languages. If we accept this terminological basis, and the whole conception, we can also speak of an analogous intralingual grapho-phonic translation in which the "source utterances" are the written ones, and the spoken ones represent the "target utterances". If, then, such switching over is to be feasible — and hardly anybody will doubt the urgency of this requirement — there must exist some kind of structural correspondence between the two norms, enabling the two "bridges" referred to above, the orthography and the pronunciation, to function as smoothly as is reasonably possible.

4 THE STRUCTURAL CORRESPONDENCES OF THE TWO LANGUAGE NORMS

In view of the fact that the basic language level, the phonological one, is made up by the, relatively speaking, smallest number of elements (the number of phonemes being, in any language, much smaller than that of morphemes, not to speak of words and units of higher levels), it would seem most feasible to have the structural correspondence of the two language norms established on this basic language level, i.e. on the correspondence of phonemes and graphemes.6 The interesting thing is, however, that hardly any written norm can be found which would implement this "ideal" correspondence type — even the written norms of Serbo-Croatian and Finnish, which appear to come closest to that ideal, do not 6

Indeed, many parallelisms can be found between these two basic elements of the two norms (for their discussion, see PULGRAM 1951); still earlier, the parallelism of phoneme and grapheme had been noticed in STETSON (1937), a brief paper which, despite some valuable glimpses, did not yet consider this problem fully. - Most recently, PULGRAM took up again the analogies and divergences of the phonic and graphical systems in another, most penetrating paper (PULGRAM, 1965), in which he compares writing and speaking also on other levels, both higher and lower than the basic (i.e. phonemic-graphemic). Some of his conclusions, of course, appear to the present writer to be too radical, as the statement: "Writing often does not closely, and sometimes not at all, in any sense reflect or mirror the structure of language and it does not need to." (PULGRAM 1965: 218) This approach has obviously been motivated by insufficient regard for the functional complementation of the spoken and written norms in language-using communities. Moreover, even in those communities in which the written norm is based on pictography, the choice of the units of content to be "mirrored" pictographically is again motivated by the structure of language (this time by the structuration enforced by the categories of the given language on the content to be expressed). Thus, it appears that evenin this extreme case writing does, and needs to, at least in some sense, reflect or mirror the structure of language.

2 2 STRUCTURAL CORRESPONDENCES OF THE TWO LANGUAGE NORMS

wholly conform to it.7 The non-existence of such "pure" cases is in full conformity with the above-noted fact that the function of the written norm of language differs principally from that of the phonetic (and, of course, also phonological) transcription which is not capable of "speaking to the eyes" as quickly and distinctly as the task of the written norm demands it. Admittedly, most of the written norms do respect the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes to a degree (and some of them to a relatively high one) but alongside this basic type of correspondence one can also ascertain in these norms at least some specimens of correspondences on some higher language level, and it is such correspondences that will now claim our attention. Before we consider such instances in some detail, however, an important lesson should be drawn from the above-noted virtual non-existence of the written norms based exclusively on the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. This nonexistence is the more striking as this type of correspondence would seem to be commended also by economic motives, as it appears to demand the minimum number of symbols and the simplest rules of their combinations. The lesson to be drawn obviously is that considerations of economy cannot rank as EXCLUSIVE criteria of correct interpretation of language facts though, of course, on the other hand, their importance should by no means be overlooked.8 This fact, incidentally, is in full conformity with the findings of information theory in which the importance of the factor of redundancy for the efficiency of the process of perception and understanding of the message communicated has been duly stressed. — It may also be pointed out that if factors of economy alone should supply the exclusive criterion of correct interpretation of language facts, it would be imperative to base the correspondence 7

One exceptional case of such "ideal" correspondence seems to be supplied by the written norm of Yakut: this striking exception is due to the fact that the system of Yakut "orthography" was devised by theoreticians of (that) language with intentional regard to Yakut phonology (a kind communication by Professor R . JAKOBSON). 8 Due attention was called to this factor (mainly on the basic, phonological level) i n MARTINET (1955).

STRUCTURAL CORRESPONDENCES OF THE TWO LANGUAGE NORMS 2 3

of the spoken and written norms on the sub-phonemic level, in which the basic oppositions of distinctive features, constituting phonemes, are even more limited in number than those of phonemes.9 Yet no one would venture to advocate this type of economy as the basis of structural correspondence, in view of the difficulties connected with reading contexts put down in terms of the distinctive features making up this sub-phonemic level. (That this is indeed so is evidenced by the fact that even the generativist phonemicists in practice often prefer to use transcription by alphabetic symbols rather than by matrices showing the make-up of the phonemes in terms of distinctive features.) Let us now take up the subject of structural correspondences of the spoken and written norms on higher language levels. One such type of correspondence has repeatedly been mentioned above; cf. BRADLEY'S remark concerning the homophonous but not homographic case of right — rite — wright — write, which clearly represents a case of correspondence on the level of words. Similar instances might, of course, be found in other languages: cf. French tant — temps, sans — sens, etc.; German Haute — heute, Laib — Leib, Saite — Seite, etc.; from Czech one might adduce the preservation in writing of the differences of i/y, l/y, despite their phonological fusion into /I/ and, respectively, /i:/ — a fusion that took place more than five centuries ago (cf. HAVRANEK 1 9 2 9 : 112, who speaks here of "¡'image visuelle differenciatrice"). Such instances are usually said to exemplify the operation of the logographic principle (this term is useful inasmuch as it helps to distinguish such instances from those in which the ideographic principle is at work, as is the case, e.g., in Chinese). Cf. also the arguments in favour of the term logographic as presented by BLOOMFIELD ( 1 9 3 3 : 2 8 5 ) .

It is only too obvious that the logqgraphic principle is in conflict with the principle of correspondence on the basic level, i.e. between phonemes and graphemes; yet it is not the only level that can be involved in such a conflict. Of particular interest are those cases in which the correspondence on the basic level is interfered with by 9

Cf. JAKOBSON - HALLE (1956).

2 4 STRUCTURAL CORRESPONDENCES OF THE TWO LANGUAGE NORMS

that on the level of morphemes. A well-known instance of such interference may be found in German where, as is commonly known, the phonological opposition of voice in word-final paired consonant phonemes becomes neutralized, but the graphemic opposition remains unimpaired (see word-pairs like Rad 'wheel' — Rat 'advice', Tod 'death' — tot 'dead'; similarly in Russian plod 'fruit' — plot 'fence'; in Czech led 'ice' — let 'flight'; etc.). Such differences between the spoken and written forms used to be accounted for by the conservative character of conventional orthography (more exactly, of written utterances) in which the difference of the final consonant phonemes, abandoned in spoken utterances long ago, has been maintained as a sort of historical survival. But already FRINTA (1909) pointed out the synchronic justification of Czech instances of the kind (see above, p. 12). The present writer tried to formulate such synchronic justification more explicitly (VACHEK 1933a): Czech orthography tends to preserve the graphical make-up of the written morpheme unchanged by occasionally (but by no means always) ignoring the phonemic differences existing between its allomorphs. — A similar tendency aimed at the preservation of the graphical shape of written morphemes can be found in the domain of vocalic graphemes of Russian. Thus, e.g., as opposed to the difference of spoken allomorphs /vad-i/Nom.sg. 'water' : /vod-u/ Acc.sg. 'water', the written norm of Russian preserves the graphical shape of the morpheme unchanged: vod-a : vod-u (other instances of the kind might of course be added). A very important contribution to the discussion on this point was made by the American linguist Dwight L. BOLINGER who did not hesitate to urge that "visual morphemes" (by which term he meant mainly the stem morphemes) exist at their own level, independently of vocal-auditory morphemes (BOLINGER 1946: 340);

for further comment on his paper see here below. So far we have drawn our illustrations of the tendency discussed from among the stem morphemes of words. Instances of this can

STRUCTURAL CORRESPONDENCES OF THE TWO LANGUAGE NORMS 2 5

also be found among the grammatical morphemes. Well-known cases of the kind are the Modern English s-endings of the plurals of nouns and of the 3rd person singular present indicative: in both grammatical categories the graphemic shape of the morpheme -(e)s is retained despite the existence of the phonemically different allomorphs /-s/, /-z/, /-iz/, alternating according to well-known morphonemic rules of Modern English. Analogous observations could be developed here about the morpheme of the Modern English preterite whose allomorphs /-d/, /-t/, /-id/ are, as a rule, uniformly reflected by the written suffixal morpheme -{e)d (though, admittedly, this concerns only the preterites of regular verbs, whereas the third person singular indicative present morpheme -(e)s has a much more general distribution). As will be discussed in some detail later below, some of the projects of the spelling reform of Modern English replace this graphical uniformity by a phonemically motivated diversity — i.e. by writing such endings as -s, -z, -ez — it is only too obvious that such replacement has to be evaluated as a retrograde step, because it renders the morphological information less clear than in the present, traditional way of writing. There is, of course, a very long way to go before some definitive conclusions can be reached concerning the principles on which the written norms of concrete languages have been, and can be, based. The number of languages examined from this viewpoint so far has been rather too small to allow far-reaching generalizations. One thing, however, appears to be certain even at the present inadequate state of research: there do not seem to exist written norms based on an exclusive correspondence on one and the same language level. It seems certain, in other words, that all written norms constitute various kinds of compromises between the correspondences established on various levels. Admittedly, in all such types of compromise the correspondence on the basic level (that of phonemes and graphemes) plays some part, and very frequently a major part. Even in those language communities which established their written norms on an ideographic basis (such as, e.g., in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script or in the

26

STRUCTURAL CORRESPONDENCES OF THE TWO LANGUAGE NORMS

present-day Chinese writing system, both of which constitute developments on an originally pictorial basis) some, though of course not many, symbols do not correspond to the ideas of extralingual reality but to some specific phonic values. One fact is certainly striking: just as it appears impossible to find a written norm built up exclusively on the phonic basis, i.e. characterized by what is conventionally called phonetic spelling (the term phonological spelling would, of course, be closer to the mark), it appears equally impossible to discover a written norm built up on an exclusively semantic basis, excluding all phonic data. 10 This absence of the two extreme types of written norms is, after all, not very surprising: it is only a natural consequence of the well-known fact that the essence of any language system rests in an extremely close, intimate connection of form and meaning, whether the form is implemented by the phonic or by the graphical substance. In any case, the frame of reference suggested by the present writer may serve as a useful instrument for the typological classification of the written norms of all languages which have so far developed them. To achieve this goal, detailed analyses of the existing written norms will have to be worked out, and only a very small fraction of the work lying ahead of this investigation may be regarded as satisfactorily accomplished.

10

The above-noted (cf. footnote 7) existence of the phonemic spelling in Yakut commented upon above, does not contradict our thesis; as already noted, the consistent correspondence found in Yakut on the basic level was imposed on the written norm of Yakut from above.

5

THE FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH AGAIN: SOME VOICES PRO ET CONTRA

From the other writings in which the analysis of some of the problems of the written norm has been appropriately tackled one should recall here again the above-noted penetrating paper BOLINGER (1946) whose author duly stressed, independently of our findings, the fact of the correspondences of the spoken and written norm on the level of morphemes. He says expressly that "visual morphemes" (by which he means mainly the stem morphemes) exist at their own level, independently of vocal-auditory morphemes. (BOLINGER 1946: 333)

Though not radically contradicting the behaviouristic basis of American linguistics of the day, he does not shrink back from the conclusion, most courageous to word in the USA of the mid nineteen-forties, that it is probably necessary to revise the dictum that 'language must always be studied without reference to writing'.

Although BOLINGER admits that the said dictum may be applied to all languages at some stage of their development and to large illiterate speech communities today,

he urges that one has to recognize a shift that has taken place in the communicative behavior of some highly literate societies (BOLINGER 1946: 340).

It will be noted that some of BOLINGER'S conclusions very closely resemble those of the present writer (VACHEK 1939), though of

28

SOME VOICES "PRO ET CONTRA"

course, it should be stressed again, they were obtained quite independently of our findings (this is obvious in view of the difficulty of access to European linguistic writings in the USA during the period of World War II). It should only be added that BOLINGER'S contribution is the more valuable that it ran counter to the strongly prevailing American linguistic traditions, backed by the authority of L. BLOOMFIELD and by the canon of principles of the descriptivist school formulated by him; note also that BOLINGER had the courage to voice his opinion on the involved issues as early as the mid-forties when the prestige of the American descriptivist school and principles still ranked very high. 11 It has been briefly noted above that the framework of the functionalist conception presented here may serve as a welcome basis of procedure for those scholars who approach the delicate problem of the reforms of orthographic systems. It has also been observed that in tackling the tricky task of such reforms the linguist may sometimes commit the mistake of enforcing a too consistent correspondence on the phonemic-graphemic level and abolishing the functionally very important correspondences on the morphemic and other higher language levels (this mistake has been committed, e.g., by the authors of the project worked out for English by the Simplified Spelling Society; cf. below, pp. 59-60). But the functionalist framework may prove useful also to those scholars who are faced with the task of establishing the graphical (and orthographical) systems for languages hitherto unrecorded in writing. This task has actually been repeatedly imposed on linguists in the course of our century — many language communities were given their written norms, e.g., on the territory of the U.S.S.R. (cf. 11 It is only just to add that BOLINGER was not the only American scholar who had doubts about the correctness of the apodictical descriptivist standpoint with regard to the supposedly inferior, derived status of written utterances. Already in 1941, William F. EDGERTON had contributed to Language a short paper (EDGERTON 1941) in which he pointed out, in conscious opposition to SAPIR and BLOOMFIELD, the existence of "ideograms" in English writing (mainly the figures denoting numbers, some "abbreviations" of the type d for 'penny', etc.). EDGERTON'S remarks, however, had only a marginal character; besides, the theoretical frame of reference in which they were placed was much vaguer than that of BOLINGER'S.

SOME VOICES "PRO ET CONTRA"

29

and in the former British colonies of Africa, where the task was performed by British phoneticians schooled by the late Daniel JONES. It has also been noted that in performing this task one may commit the mistake of unduly emphasizing the systematic correspondence on the basic language level (see the above-mentioned case of the Yakut language). In view of the importance of the involved problems one should not be surprised that one of the very penetrating papers on these issues was written by the British Africanist Jack BERRY and that some of the conclusions reached by that author in his paper (BERRY 1 9 5 8 ) are not unlike those outlined in our own functionalist framework presented above. BERRY, of course, could not avoid some misunderstandings of that framework. He says, e.g., that JAKOVLEV

1928)

despite eloquent pleas [...] that writing can and should be considered as basically a visual system independent of the vocal-auditory processes (BERRY 1958: 752)

one should ask if it is likely that any system of writing would be seriously proposed today that was not based on an attempt at a systematic correlation with t h e s p o k e n l a n g u a g e ? (BERRY 1958: 753)

Naturally, no one would now dare to propose such a system; and our own functionalist framework makes a special point of stressing that some structural correspondence (or, in BERRY'S term, correlation) between the spoken and the written norm is most essential, for the very reason that the language user must very often switch over from the spoken utterances to the written ones and vice versa, and that such switching must be done according to a reasonably organized set of rules (see above, pp. 1 6 - 7 , 1 8 - 2 0 ) . An important feature of BERRY'S contribution is the attention paid in it to the sociolinguistic aspects of the problem of establishing written norms. He rightly urges that due account must be taken, e.g., of the social attitudes of the people towards their language, of the status of the language (national, vernacular, second language), etc. Also his statement that the solution of the problems of alphabet-making [...] is in the nature of a calculated compromise

30

SOME VOICES "PRO ET CONTRA"

gives evidence of the author's realistic approach of the issues involved; he under standingly speaks of a marked trend towards tolerance of synthetic writing systems and away from the illusory concept of the "pure" phonetic or phonemic transcription (BERRY 1958: 759),

although otherwise he appears to feel sympathetically towards the phonemic orthographic systems. One cannot indeed close one's eyes to the sociological, cultural, and civilizational circumstances which may set the limits to the possibilities of the solution that might appear optimal from a purely linguistic point of view. In any case, the problem of the written norm of language and of orthography (including its reforms) calls for more attention to sociolinguistically oriented research than has been given to it hitherto. Here again the coordination of the internal and external factors influencing the state of the language system may prove to be just as fascinating as in the examination of language development which the present writer tackled in some detail a decade ago (VACHEK 1 9 6 2 ) .

Another scholar to be registered here is the Finnish linguist Aarne PENTTILA who very recently published an interesting study of some problems of written language (PENTTILA 1 9 7 0 ) . He refers in it to some of his earlier papers (and to one or two by Sture ALLEN of 1 9 6 5 ) , published, respectively, in 1 9 3 2 and 1 9 4 3 ; none of these publications has so far become known or accessible to the present writer. The 1 9 7 0 version of PENTTILA'S theses shows, in many points, very penetrating insight into the problems in question and arrives at a number of conclusions which are in full agreement with those established on the basis of the Prague framework. The main difference between the Prague and PENTTILA'S conceptions is the lack, in the Finnish scholar's paper, of functionalist considerations and in general, of a recognition of the normative character of 'written language' seen as a system. It is exactly this lack which is responsible for his statement (PENTTILA 1 9 7 0 : 3 7 ) that so far no satisfactory answer has been given to the "undoubtedly important" question of why the clearly separate systems of spoken and written language, used in one and the same language community, can be

SOME VOICES "PRO ET CONTRA"

31

conceived of as constituting one and the same language. The Prague thesis of the functionalist complementation of the two can, of course, answer that question to full satisfaction. — It should be stressed that any scholar dealing with problems of the written norm will profit immensely by reading PENTTILA'S arguments; let us only point out his attempt to utilize set theory for the development of a general theory of graphemes (a more detailed analysis of it is not feasible within the narrow limits of this survey). Most recently, the mutual relation of writing and speech was analysed by William HAAS (his monograph (HAAS 1970), as well as the anthology HAAS (1969a), reached the present writer only after the manuscript of the present survey had been ready for print, and thus only passing comment can be inserted here on HAAS' most valuable and penetrating contributions to our problems). HAAS' approach is, in principle, virtually identical with that of the present writer, some difference being mainly in the distribution of emphasis: while we are chiefly concentrating on the functional complementariness of the two corresponding language norms, spoken and written, HAAS is mainly interested in the process of switching which takes place regularly between the two (hence also the title of his monograph). He presents a minute and delicate analysis of the process, adducing fascinating parallels between the intralingual phono-graphic translation and the actual interlingual translation from one language to another. The process is studied with special regard to problems of the English spelling reform, and due regard is also taken of the "untranslatables", i.e. of such specific qualities of spoken and written utterances as have no parallels implemented in the other medium (some of the problems had been foreshadowed in our earlier Czech paper (VACHEK 1942), which clearly was inaccessible to HAAS). What has been said above of PENTTILA'S book, can be repeated here with even greater emphasis: no linguist interested in problems of written language can risk ignoring H A A S ' monograph. The functionalist conception of the written norm as a relatively autonomous language system has also proved useful in some other branches of research. Starting from this conception, the Scottish

32

SOME VOICES "PRO ET CONTRA"

anglicist Angus MCINTOSH, in collaboration with his colleague M. L. SAMUELS, successfully attempted the task of surveying Middle English dialects of the period roughly delimited by the years 1350 and 1450 (MCINTOSH 1956, 1961, 1963; SAMUELS 1963). Unlike other experts in Middle English, the two scholars do not interpret their written texts "as a sort of encoded form of some variety of Spoken English" but undertake a detailed examination of the writing practice of the analysed manuscripts and attempt to characterize this practice which, in their opinion, being directly accessible, allows for safer conclusions than the traditional approach. The said procedure is combined by the authors with the so-called "fit-method", i.e. the authors ascribe the examined manuscripts to those areas of the country to which they appear to "fit" best by their characteristic graphical features. In this way they believe to achieve a more exact and detailed classification of Middle English dialects than could be the one obtained by traditional methods and procedures. What, however, is even more important, MCINTOSH'S and approach appears to throw some new light upon the old problem of the rise of the Modern English standard language. In the authors' opinion, the main sources of this standard were not, as is generally believed, the dialects of the East Midlands, but rather those of the Central Midlands area. This theory has much to commend it from the functionalist point-of-view: the East Midland dialects of Middle English had only a peripheral status and so do not seem to have been particularly fit to serve as a basis of a koiné which was to cater for the communicative needs of Middle English speakers of all dialects. On the other hand the Central Midlands dialects, on account of their geographical and linguistic character, were much better fitted for the said task. On account of its general linguistic significance, special comment is needed on MCINTOSH (1961). In it, the author calls the readers' attention to the fact that "a written text normally carries a sort of double semantic load" (MCINTOSH 1961: 109): first, it refers to the extra-lingual reality — here the author is in full agreement with our theory (see his reference MCINTOSH 1961: 110) —, and second, it SAMUELS'

SOME VOICES "PRO ET CONTRA"

33

bears the information which "enables us to read our text aloud if we wish to" (MCINTOSH 1 9 6 1 : 1 1 0 ) . Reference to this second kind of semantic load is of course tantamount to our establishment of necessary structural correspondence between the two norms of language, spoken and written. But MCINTOSH goes further than this: distinguishing, thus, the "linguistic meaning" from the "phonic meaning" he finds that in the system whereby conversion [of written language] to spoken language is possible [...] the grapheme has a status which might be described as morphemic (MCINTOSH 1 9 6 1 : 109).

If that is so, then an instance of two possible phonic values of, say, the English grapheme c (namely [k] or [s]) may be treated as a case of homonymy (MCINTOSH 1 9 6 1 : 1 1 6 ) , and, indeed, a written word may be considered as having the status of a sentence in the spoken language. It should be at least briefly noted that the fundamental idea on which MCINTOSH'S conception in this point appears to be based, had also been worded, independently of MCINTOSH, by BAZELL ( 1 9 5 6 ) ; see his thesis quoted also by PULGRAM ( 1 9 6 5 : 2 1 2 note 1 0 ) to the effect that the graphic categories, as compared with the phonic categories, are shifted each time one unit along the hierarchy. It was a mistake to suppose that they occupy the same position in the hierarchy as the units they stand f o r (BAZELL 1 9 5 6 : 45). BAZELL'S and MCINTOSH'S thesis was recently criticized, justly in our opinion, in HAAS ( 1 9 7 0 ) . HAAS rightly insists on the fact that the "phonic meaning" of a grapheme, the idea on which the thesis mentioned is based, is a fictitious concept. The relation holding between the graphic and the phonic elements is not reference but correspondence. (HAAS 1 9 7 0 : 1 5 ) It is, in fact, from this relation of correspondence that HAAS derives his main thesis that, while writing and speech both refer to things, writing translates speech (and vice versa). This sounds most reasonable: in view of the "binormism" undoubtedly existing in the consciousness of language users, the functional, pragmatically motivated parallelism of spoken and

34

SOME VOICES "PRO ET CONTRA"

written utterances, words, morphemes and, last but not least, phonemes and graphemes can hardly be open to doubt. All the facts so far mentioned here may be regarded as evidence of the tenability, and indeed fruitfulness, of the conception of binormism following from the functionalist approach as presented above. Still, this concept cannot be said to have met with general approval, and some arguments voiced against it have been adduced — quite recently — by scholars of world-wide prestige. lla We have already noted in passing Charles F. H O C K E T T ' S standpoint in H O C K E T T (1958); in a more recent paper he stresses the fact that "the channel for all linguistic communication is vocal-auditory", and comes to the conclusion that this fact "excludes written language from the category 'human language'" (HOCKETT 1963: 7) just as it excludes from it African drum signals (!). He also comments on the relatively late emergence of writing in language communities and on its non-existence in many of them. 12 As already pointed out in the earlier part of the present survey, the non-universal character of the written norm of language does not disprove its importance: the now fashionable quest for language universals should not make the linguist blind to the question of what is optimal in language and to the process of the gradual increase of the functional capacity of language — one of the most 118

Fred W. HOUSEHOLDER'S most penetrating paper "On the primacy of writing" (HOUSEHOLDER 1971) reached us only after the manuscript of the present book was sent to the printer and so could unfortunately not be analysed here. HOUSEHOLDER'S views are in many points parallel to, though not identical with, those of our own. 12 In the second edition of HOCKETT'S paper his negative approach is somewhat modified (HOCKETT 1966:14), but in essence the author's standpoint remained unaltered ("in this paper I shall exclude writing" HOCKETT 1966: 14). Just for the sake of interest let it be noted that not all scholars have been convinced of the historical priority of spoken utterances over of written ones. Thus, Jacob van GINNEKEN believed that the first stage in the development of language had been represented by gestures, which were to be followed by pictography and only then the 'phonetic elements' (GINNEKEN 1939: 234) were to emerge. This theory was, of course, rejected by most scholars (see, e.g., GELB 1963: 48, 283) but it may be adduced here to show that even for the prehistoric stages of languages opinions may differ so much that all generalizations seem to be rather risky.

SOME VOICES "PRO ET CONTRA"

35

important stages of that process was certainly the emergence of the written utterances and, consequently, of the written norm underlying them. Besides, we also find in HOCKETT'S paper the objection that letters (or rather graphemes, i.e. the smallest elements of the written norm viewed as a system) "are not built up of a small stock of simpler cenemes" (HOCKETT 1 9 6 6 : 15) (i.e. of still smaller elements that would correspond in the written norm to the distinctive features found in the spoken). In other words, writing is asserted by HOCKETT to lack "the duality of patterning". This objection, incidentally, was also voiced by Roman JAKOBSON (JAKOBSON - HALLE 1 9 5 6 : 17) who aptly opposes the non-dissociable structure of graphemes13 to the dissociable structure of phonemes (which, as is well-known, have been defined by Jakobson as "bundles of distinctive features"). (JAKOBSON 1 9 6 2 : 6 5 3 - 4 ) To this objection it may be said (see VACHEK 1965a) that the structuration of phonemes is indeed not paralleled by that of the graphemes, but that this fact does not disagree with our basic thesis asserting the necessity of structural correspondence of the spoken and written norms on SOME language level. It has been noticed here that this correspondence need not (and indeed cannot) be established on all levels but only on those where it is functionally most feasible — mainly on the basic (phonemic-graphemic) level, mostly with some interference of correspondences on higher levels, especially on those of morphemes and words. On the subphonemic level (i.e. on the level of distinctive features and their hypothetical written correlates) such a correspondence does not appear feasible because to establish it would require the introduction into the graphemic inventory of a very complex system of diacritical marks placed in vertical arrangement 14 to the basic 13

Admittedly, attempts to dissociate graphemes into smaller "segments" have so far not been particularly successful (see, e.g., E D E N 1961). 14 An interesting parallel to this may be found in recent writings on phonological problems by the adherents of the generativist and transformationalist approach: although theoretically they prefer to replace phonemic facts in terms of the matrices of distinctive features, in practice they often take recourse to the traditional transcription in terms of non-diacriticized graphemic symbols.

36

SOME VOICES " P R O ET CONTRA"

grapheme so as to indicate the co-existence in time of the corresponding distinctive features within one and the same phoneme. It is, however, universally known that writing systems have been strongly opposed to such cumulation of diacritical marks because the absence (or at least scarcity) of such marks makes both the writing and the reading of graphemic contexts much easier than it would be in the contexts which abound in marks of the kind. So much for the objection shared by HOCKETT and JAKOBSON. JAKOBSON, however, also adduces other objections which deserve to be commented upon here in some detail. He rightly urges that although writing may exhibit some autonomous properties [...] it always remains a superstructure, nevertheless, because no speech community and none of its participants can acquire and manipulate the graphic pattern without possessing a phonemic system and justly declares that to preach the mere coexistence of the phonological and graphic systems while denying the primary, fundamental nature of the former would be a misleading distortion of the actual linguistic stratification. (JAKOBSON-HALLE 1 9 5 6 : 16-7)

This, of course, is in full agreement with the Prague functionalist approach in which the spoken norm is qualified as the unmarked member of the opposition, while the written norm, constituting the marked member of it, definitely represents a kind of superstructure over its spoken counterpart. It appears, then, that Jakobson's criticism is directed rather against the glossematicist conception (exemplified above in our comment on U L D A L L ' S paper) than against our own. There is, however, another point in JAKOBSON'S earlier argumentation (cf. above) which really runs counter to the functionalist approach as presented above. JAKOBSON'S refutation of the thesis that "linguistic form is manifested in two equipollent substances — graphic and phonetic" (a refutation to which we would unhesitatingly add our signature, too) is propped up by an argument adducing some analogy taken from music. In JAKOBSON'S words, it would be just as untenable

37

SOME V O I C E S " P R O ET C O N T R A "

to maintain that musical form is manifested in two variables - notes and sounds. For just as musical form cannot be abstracted from the sound matter it organizes, so form in phonemics is to be studied in relation to the sound matter which the linguistic code selects, readjusts, dissects, and classifies along its own lines. Like musical scales, phonemic patterning is an intervention of culture in nature, an artifact imposing logical rules u p o n t h e s o u n d c o n t i n u u m . (JAKOBSON - H A L L E 1 9 5 6 :

The objection of

JAKOBSON'S

16-7)

should be considered in connection

with his categorical statement that "written or printed symbols are symbols of symbols'"'' ( J A K O B S O N

1971:654;

italics by R .

J.).

This state-

ment, however, can be unconditionally approved only for the earliest attempts at putting d o w n spoken utterances in writing.

The

interesting thing is, of course, that as s o o n as some scribal tradition develops in a given language community a tendency emerges aimed at establishing a direct link between the written utterance and the extralingual reality t o which it refers. Such direct link implies that the originally existing detour via the corresponding spoken utterances is becoming gradually abandoned and that, at least to a degree, the written or printed symbols are gradually acquiring the status of signs of the first order (cf.

VACHEK

1959:

8, 14). That this is really so is evidenced by the fact of "silent reading", in which an experienced reader can peruse a written page at a much higher speed than if he were actually to read the same text aloud. 1 5 15

The habit of silent reading is, naturally, a very recent phenomenon in the history of mankind (and takes some time to be developed in any member of a language community); for some interesting remarks on its absence in medieval language communities see CHAYTOR ( 1 9 6 0 ) . - See also a very apt comment by E. PULGRAM: "!...] indeed skillful reading ought not to be accompanied by internal or external vocalization (except when the reader wishes to savor the stylistic and acoustic beauty of a piece of literature)" (PULGRAM 1 9 6 5 : 2 2 0 ) . (Italics added by the present writer who, besides, would like to delete, in PULGRAM'S otherwise perfectly correct statement, the words "stylistic and" - that is, we believe that the stylistic values of a context do not necessarily need vocalization to be obvious to an experienced recipient, but may be recognized and enjoyed by him even in silent reading.) - On the presence of stylistic and paralinguistic information transmitted by the written (mainly printed) utterances see the illuminating paper by Eric P . HAMP (HAMP 1 9 5 9 ) . - Finally, let us quote I.J. GELB who rightly urges that "as we know from experience, supported by experiments in the field of psychology, [...] we can think without a silent flow

38

SOME VOICES "PRO EN CONTRA"

In our opinion, it is exactly this gradually increasing direct link between written utterances and the extralingual reality which is apt to reveal that JAKOBSON'S argument establishing some analogy between the written norm and the musical notation is not quite convincing. Unlike a written utterance, a piece of music put down in musical notation cannot bypass the phonic implementation which is its acoustic correlate: as a matter of fact, the given musical notation only has the aim to represent graphically the phonic values of the given piece of music — one might even call the former a kind of recipe for the phonic implementation of the latter. In other words, if one were to find, in the sphere of language, some parallel to musical notation it certainly would not be "writing" but rather the phonetic transcription, the raison d'être of which — as pointed out above — is to register by graphical means the acoustic make-up of the spoken utterances (in other words, to function as a kind of recipe for the production of the said acoustic make-up). The correctness of the parallel just established is borne out by another consideration. It will be recalled that in the earlier part of the present survey we contrasted phonetic transcription and the device called spelling (in the narrower sense of the word, i.e., the naming of graphemes). As was shown above, "spelling" registers by acoustic means the optical make-up of the written utterance. If we now examine the sphere of music and its own notation, it will be found that here, too, one can find an interesting parallel to "spelling" : it is the device of naming each of the notes by established musicological terms (such as G sharp, A flat, etc.). Clearly, if the of words and [...] we can understand the meaning of things for which we have no word in mind" (GELB 1965: 9). - On the other hand, one cannot quite agree with GELB when he says that "the philologists, who believe that writing even after the introduction of phonetization was used for the recording or transmission of both idea and sound, fail to understand that once man discovered a way of expressing exact forms of speech in written signs, writing lost its independent character and became largely a written substitute for its spoken counterpart." (GELB 1965: 9) As already noted above, this may have been so only when the first attempts at putting down spoken utterances in writing were launched, and not later, when scribal traditions were to develop in any community and so to establish the more or less direct link between the written utterance and the extralingual reality referred to.

SOME VOICES "PRO EN CONTRA"

39

musical notation of a piece of music is "spelled" in this manner, one has, first of all, to evoke the phonic values corresponding to the "spelled" items, and only then get some idea of the melody of the piece mediated in this way. In other words, both the musical notation and the musical "spelling" represent signs of the second order, and the parts performed by them in the domain of music are found to be perfectly comparable to those performed in the domain of language by the phonetic transcription and "spelling", respectively. It may be concluded, therefore, that also the objections against the autonomous character of the written norm as voiced by JAKOBSON can be faced by those who are convinced of the adequacy of the conceptual framework presented here. It should be realized, in any case, that even JAKOBSON himself admits that writing "may exhibit some autonomous properties" and that the main stress is laid by him on the "superstructural" status of the written norm (as opposed to the spoken) (JAKOBSON HALLE 1 9 5 6 : 1 6 - 7 ) . This, as already noted, can of course be perfectly squared with the hierarchical relation of the two norms as stipulated in our conceptual framework. The marked status of the written norm (opposed to the unmarked status of its spoken counterpart) is in full agreement with the specific cultural and civilizational functions it is called upon to perform in culturally advanced language communities: if an overall examination of the said hierarchical relation of the two norms is undertaken, it will be found that those of the features of the written norm which at first sight may look like structural defects prove to be motivated exactly by the said higher functions performed by it, and by it alone. Unless therefore some more conclusive evidence is brought up against the conception of the two specialized norms coexisting within culturally advanced language communities, this conception may be regarded as a sound basis of further research in the field, a field which opens vast possibilities of confrontational studies not only of different written norms (such as English VJ. German, French, Russian, etc.) but also of different stages of one and the same language. The latter type of studies will be touched upon in the following chapter.

6 SOME REMARKS ON THE WRITTEN N O R M AS A FACTOR I N L A N G U A G E DEVELOPMENT

Already R. H.

STETSON

pointed out, most convincingly, that

writing has been subject to all the influences which modify a language and its phonology (STETSON 1937: 353)

and adduces as such factors, e.g., the increased tempo of life, the swift diffusion of court influence, etc., which affect handwriting quite as they aifect the forms and 'sounds' of spreech. (STETSON 1937: 353)

But there are more interesting points that call for comment in this connection: attention should also be paid to the shifts that may occur, in the course of the development of language, in the relation of the two norms, and mainly to the influence each of the two norms exercises on its opposite number. Some more concrete illustrations will explain what is covered by this formula. As has been shown earlier (VACHEK 1959: chapter 2), the structural correspondence linking the spoken and the written norm in one and the same language community need not remain stable in the course of language development but may undergo important changes. In English, e.g., a shift appears to have taken place from the correspondence built up almost exclusively on the basic level (phonemes — graphemes), with some interference of the morphological level, to the present state of things in which the logographic principle has come to play a hardly unimportant part. But even apart from this general trend observable in the development of English one may find some interesting features of the mutual relation of the two norms that call for some attention.

WRITTEN NORM AS A FACTOR IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

41

Students of the historical development of English have known for many decades that this mutual influence is far from being onesided, i.e. that not only the development of the spoken norm became reflected in the changes of the written norm, but that also cases of opposite influence have been by no means rare. One is faced here with the instances of "spelling pronunciations", a phenomenon that more than once attracted the attention of the historians of English (see, e.g., BUCHMANN 1 9 4 0 ) . But the manner in which cases of spelling pronunciation were dealt with was, as a rule, concerned with isolated instances of the influence of the written word-form upon its spoken counterpart, and no broader theoretical framework has been worked out that could afford a deeper insight into the relation of the two norms engaged in the influence. A deeper analysis of at least some such cases is apt to reveal that the impact of the written norm in them was not a fortuitous affair but that, at least in such cases, this impact played a positive part in helping to solve some of the problems the spoken norm of English had to face in the given period. Lack of space does not permit more than a brief mention of two such instances taken from Early Modern English (for their more detailed treatment, s e e VACHEK 1 9 6 2 ) .

The first case to be touched upon here is that of the Modern English words of the type joint [d3Dint] and point [point], the diphthongal nucleus of which goes back to Middle English ui (the words, of course, were taken over from French, their Latin prototypes having been junctum and punctum). The first component of the Middle English diphthong ui was to be subjected, from the Early Modern English period onward, to the development perfectly parallel to that of ME u (as in much, fun); thus, it went through the stage oi to a/,16 which must have been reached about the middle of the 18th century. This can be inferred from rhymes like joins — refines, toil — compile, poison — surprise on and the like, evidenced in poems written in the 17th and 18th centuries. The second members of such oppositions originally had the stem-vowel 1 in Middle 16

Cf. LUICK (1914-40: § 544) and HORN - LEHNERT (1953: § 185).

42

WRITTEN NORM AS A FACTOR IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

English, which in the course of the Great Vowel Shift went through the successive stages ii > ei > ai > ai, and in the course of the 17th century must have reached the stage of ai, with the result that the word pairs instanced here above must have made unobjectionable rhymes. The striking fact is, however, that the ^/-diphthong going back to ME ui was not to merge with the ai going back to ME I for good and to develop, together with it, into ModE [ai]. More exactly, this consistent merger development was to be really effected in some Modern English dialects but not in the standard language in which the first members of the above-adduced wordpairs have now the diphthong [DI]. As is generally known, this striking deviation from the expected outcome of the process followed here is commonly explained as due to the influence of spelling. Admittedly, words like joint, point, and the like had been written with oi/oy since their first emergence in Modern English, which had taken them over with this spelling from Norman French. This explanation is most probably unobjectionable as far as it goes, but still cannot be regarded as linguistically quite satisfactory. The thing which makes the linguist feel rather unhappy about it is the isolationist treatment of the problem, and the disregard of the general situation both in the spoken and in the written norm of English at the time when the spelling pronunciation asserted itself in the standard language. If the assertion of 01 in Early Modern English is examined from the standpoint just indicated, one question emerges as rather urgent: Why has the spelling pronunciation made its way into the spoken norm precisely in this type of words, not in some other types in which, too, the grapheme o corresponded to the spoken a at that period, exactly as in the word-type containing the diphthong ail We have in mind here words spelled like come and love (going back to OE cuman and lufian) in the spoken forms of which the ME /u/-phoneme must have developed, by the middle of the 17th century, into a, so that the pronunciation of such words must have been [kam] and [lav]. And yet no trace of any tendency was seen to emerge that would have been directed at the replacement of this [a] by [o] or [ou], which might have benefited from the assertion

WRITTEN NORM AS A FACTOR IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

43

of spelling pronunciation in them. This striking difference of development in the two word-types, the difference ascertainable only by a systemic, global view, certainly calls for some explanation. A closer examination of the matter will reveal that the penetration of the spelling pronunciation [DI] in the word-type joint, point appears to have been functionally motivated, i.e. furthered by the needs and wants of the spoken norm of Early Modern English. First, it will be useful to recall the well-known fact that, as a rule, in the phonological system of present day Modern English the diphthong [01] signals the synchronically foreign status 17 of the word in which it occurs (this was pointed out by the present writer almost four decades ago; see VACHEK 1933b: 133, 165, et passim). Undoubtedly, it must have been felt as such a signal for many centuries, more exactly, since the diphthongs gi and ui, until then unknown in English, had penetrated into it in loan-words of AngloNorman origin. In writing, both diphthongs were put down, according to the Anglo-Norman scribal traditions, as oi/oy. When, as shown here above, the original Middle English diphthong ui reached the stage ai in its development, the way was open for the definitive merger of the two ^/-sounds representing the original Middle English phonemes /i:/ and /ui/. Such a merger, however, would have resulted in the virtually complete domestication of the synchronically foreign words in which exactly the M/'-diphthong used to constitute the signal of their synchronically foreign status. Such domestication, it should be noted, would have radically separated the word-type joint, point from the word-type choice, joy, which from the very start of its existence in English had contained the pi-diphthong, another sign of synchronically foreign status. It thus appears that in the Early Modern English period a tendency asserted itself in the standard language to strengthen the lexical and stylistic links existing between the two word-types, a tendency which proved strong enough to oppose the possibility of the phonemic merger 17

On the signals of synchronically foreign characters in a language, see MATHESIUS (1935); one of the categories of such signals is, according to him, "das Verhältnis der Orthographie zur Aussprache." (MATHESIUS 1935: 31-2)

44

WRITTEN NORM AS A FACTOR IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

of the continuations of ME /i:/ and /ui/, provided that some means could be found to oppose that merger. And it may be assumed that exactly the parallelism of the written forms of the two word-types concerned, employing one and the same digraph oi/oy, proved to be such means: the written parallelism supplied the impulse for the establishment of an analogous parallelism of the two wordtypes concerned also in the spoken norm. These, in our opinion, had been the motives that ultimately led to the assertion of the spelling pronunciation of the [oij-type18 in the Early Modern English words at that time pronounced with [si] < ME ui. The correctness of this diagnosis is borne out by an analogous analysis of the instances of the type come, love in which, as pointed out above, no tendency has ever appeared in Early Modern English to replace the [a]-sound (again going back to ME /u/), under the influence of spelling, by something like [a] or [ou]. An examination of the structural situation in this particular word-type within the two language norms of Early Modern English, spoken and written, is bound to reveal that no structural incentives can be discovered here that might have furthered the penetration of some "spelling pronunciation". First of all, it should be realized that words like come and love do not belong to the synchronically foreign, but to the synchronically domestic lexical stratum of English. This stratum, admittedly, represents in any language a central, stylistically19 unmarked zone of the lexical level and as such it is not expected to be characterized by any specific phonemic or graphical signals — as a matter of fact it forms a kind of neutral background against which the phonemic and/or graphemic features signalling the synchronically foreign character are expected to stand out. — The other circumstance to be noted here is that the sounds [o] and [ou], which alone might have been considered as potential replacers of the Early ModE a in the word-type come, love, were by no means fit for signalling any of the two lexical strata, 18

Some other phonological problems connected with the Modern English diphthong [01] were discussed in Vachek (1965b). 19 For the specific stylistic function performed in English by foreign lexical items since the Middle English period, see Baugh (1959:257-82).

W R I T T E N N O R M AS A FACTOR I N L A N G U A G E DEVELOPMENT

45

synchronically foreign and synchronically domestic, because they occurred — and still occur — in both of them. It is exactly this non-differentiated distribution within the two strata that marks these sounds against the dipthong [01] the occurrence of which in the synchronically marked stratum has been characteristic of it since the beginning of its existence in the English language.20 So much for the first instance of the interference of the written norm in the structure of the spoken norm, in which the interference appears to have been motivated by the functional needs and wants of the norm undergoing this influence. The other instance is that of the Early Modern English restitution of the pronunciation of [-rj] in the verbal -/«g-forms. As is well known, in such forms the final [-iq] had become changed into [-in] at the beginning of Early Modern English, but in the standard pronunciation the velar nasal [ij] was to be restored by the end of the 17th century. This restoration is generally (and again no doubt justly) attributed to the effort of the theoreticians of language who insisted on having the final digraph -ng "fully pronounced": clearly, the theoreticians were fighting here for the cause of the spelling pronunciation, because the final -ng continued to be written even after the spoken [-q] had been replaced by [-n]. But it should again be asked why the effort of the theoreticians was to prove successful in this point, whereas in many other instances they were fighting for lost causes. Again it appears that the restitution of the pronunciation [-rj] in these cases was functionally motivated by the needs and wants of the phonological system of English. As was shown in detail in another of our papers (VACHEK 1964b), there existed in the Early Modern English period two theoretical possibilities of evaluating [g] phonologicaly, one of them being the attribution to it of a separate phonemic status (i.e., its interpretation as /rj/), while the other possibility was to regard it as an implementation of the biphonemic group /ng/. Viewed in this context, the original replacement of [-q] by [-n] in the iwg-forms in Early Modern English may have represented an important step towards the abolishment of the 20

See, among other things, the interesting remarks by ZACHRISSON (1925).

46

WRITTEN NORM AS A FACTOR IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

independent phonemic status of /g/ (the functional load of which, admittedly, had never been very impressive) and to the strengthening of the weight of those factors which spoke for the biphonemic interpretation of the velar nasal, i.e. for /ng/. From all this it follows that the reassertion of the spelling pronunciation of -ing was to lead, very naturally, to the strengthening of the jeopardized systemic position of /g/ as a separate phoneme of Modern English. It appears indeed that this strengthening was, in the long run, indicated by the structural needs and wants of the Modern English phonological system, because the abolition of the phonemic status of /g/ would have resulted in the emergence in the Modern English phonological system of one of the "empty spaces" (cases vides), as they are called by MARTINET (1955), who very convincingly pointed out the importance of the filling of such spaces if the phonemes adjoining them in the system are to be more firmly integrated in it. 21 This can be realized from the scheme showing the situation in the concerned section of the Modern English system of consonant phonemes: /p/-/b/-/m/ /t/-/d/-/n/ /k/-/g/-/g/ These two instances of interference of the written norm in the development of its spoken counterpart may justify our thesis that some new light might be thrown on the historical development of languages if due consequences were derived from the coexistence in them of the two norms, spoken and written: at least some cases of spelling pronunciation might be found less fortuitous than is usually taken for granted. So far we have been discussing here, if quite briefly, those cases in which the written norm in the course of its history influenced its 21

The importance of the principle of firm integration is borne out by the fact that a phoneme which has been released from such integration is exposed to the danger of being abolished as an uneconomic element of the phonological system (this has actually taken place in the case of ModE /h/; see VACHEK 1964a: chapter 2).

WRITTEN NORM AS A FACTOR IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

47

parallel spoken norm. The opposite cases, i.e. those in which the written norm in the course of its history has been influenced by its parallel spoken norm are often, mainly in modern times, connected with cases of the "spelling reforms" (not called so quite exactly, because the change of the set of rules essential for the transposition of spoken utterances into the written ones is only a mechanical consequence of the changes of relations existing between the two norms). Problems of this kind will be discussed here later on. For the moment we only want to point out that in such instances also sociolinguistic factors come into play, while in the instances of the above types (concerned with Early ModE oi, -ing) the sociolinguistic factor, if involved at all, remains in the background. One is thus faced, in this latter type of instances, with some outside impact on the written norm, an impact which is exercised either by the theoreticians of that same language community or by the influence of the written norm of some other language community, in which case this influence may be not only positive, but — and that not infrequently — also negative. As instances of the former category may be adduced, e.g., the changes introduced into the written norm of Russian in the early nineteen-twenties (the abolition of some graphemes like b, i, t), or into the written norm of Czech in the early fifteenth century (such as the abandonment of digraphs like sz and cz for simple phonemes and their replacement by diacriticized graphemes s and 6, that is the present s and c). Into the latter category also belong such radical changes as the full-scale replacement of the whole graphemic inventory by another one (such a drastic change took place in the mid nineteentwenties in the Turkish language community when the country abandoned many of its traditional aspects of life and replaced them by some characteristic of the Western civilization, and in this context also replaced old Arabic writing by an adaptation of the Latin alphabet). — On the other hand, one may mention here some less radical but sociolinguistically most interesting changes reflecting the cultural sympathies, or — perhaps even more frequently — antipathies of the given language community to some other community, neighbouring or more distant.

48

WRITTEN NORM AS A FACTOR IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Into this category certainly belong such graphemic changes as the abandonment in Lithuanian of the digraphs sz and cz (and of the diacriticized z) and their replacement by s, c, and z; the change was undoubtedly motivated by the intention to differentiate the Lithuanian graphemic system from that of Polish. — An analogous case of intentional differentiation can be found in the history of the Czech linguistic community which in the eighteen-forties abolished the grapheme w and the digraph au (corresponding to the spoken /ou/) and replaced them by v and ou, respectively. This change was clearly motivated by the intention to differentiate Czech written utterances from the German ones in which w and au had been fairly frequent in analogous functions. In written English such foreign influence can be found on the level of words. It asserted itself in the New Learning period when the written forms of English words of French origin were changed so as to resemble more closely their real or supposed Latin prototypes. Here, belong the well-known replacements of dette and doute by debt and doubt, similarly the replacement of vittles by victuals, etc. Adaptations of the kind may be met with also on French soil: under the influence of Latin terra et ala, the spellings tere and ele were replaced by terre and aile, respectively; homophonous /ta/ was differentiated in writing into tant: temps after the model of Latin tantumitempus (for English instances, see BAUGH 1959: 250; for French cf. BRUNOT - BRUNEAU 1949: 18-9). So much could be said here about some of the general issues concerning the concept of written language and the functionalist approach of these issues. In the following chapters we want to concentrate on some specific issues of the written norm of Modern English, with special regard to the vexed question of its spelling reform, attempted over and over again but so far without any tangible effect. It will be seen that here, too, some more general issues can be detected which may be of interest not to Anglicists alone but to linguists at large.

7 SOME CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES O F THE WRITTEN N O R M O F ENGLISH

The first thing that is likely to strike any linguist confronting English written utterances with those written in most other European languages will be the absence in the inventory of English graphical means of any diacriticized graphemes, i.e. of graphemes with any diacritical marks placed both above the letters (such as can be found in French, German, Czech, Polish, etc.) and below them (as in French p, Roumanian ( and f, Polish q, q, etc.). Moreover, the English inventory of graphemes is remarkable for not containing any undiacriticized letters of unusual shape (such as are found, e.g., in the German fi or Danish ) or ligatures of letters (such as exist in French ce, Danish a, etc.). This "sobriety" of the English graphemic inventory is the more striking as it is a relatively recent phenomenon: in the Old English period such "unusual" graphemes were not unknown in English. There were two Germanic characters (thorn and wen), and some Latin letters were not used in the shapes common on the continent but in those employed by the Irish who had taught the Anglo-Saxons how to write (thus, there were special Celtic varieties of the letters g and r), and there existed in Old English also some ligatures (mainly ce and ce), not to mention the enigmatic diacritical mark, transcribed in textbooks - especially the older ones - by the sign of the acute, the function of which has never been satisfactorily elucidated. In other words, the Old English inventory of graphemes was to become Europeanized only during the later development of the English written norm, and this Europeanization was to be effected so radically that at present the English written norm, in this particular point,

5 0 CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF THE WRITTEN NORM OF ENGLISH

surpasses the written norms of most other European languages.22 The technological advantage of easy reproduction of English contexts in print must, naturally, be paid for by the existence of some other disadvantage, that is by the use of polygraphs (mostly digraphs or trigraphs). Use is made of them in most European languages; even those written norms which are, on the whole, systematically built up on the correspondence of phonemes and graphemes will be found to include at least a few of them. Thus, Modern Czech possesses the digraph ch (corresponding to the phoneme /x/, implemented by the voiceless velar fricative sound [x]). And it is certainly noteworthy that demands for the reform of the Czech orthographic system have never been directed against this digraph, despite its only too obvious violation of the principle of correspondence on the basic level. The reason of this tolerant attitude of both Czech spelling reformers and Czech language users to this digraph is not difficult to find: there are virtually no instances in which the phonemic correspodence to this digraph would be something different from /x/ - especially the phonemic sequence of /c/ + /h/, which one might expect to correspond to the written ch, is virtually excluded here. In other words, there is no danger of misunderstanding or misinterpreting the digraph ch: it never represents anything but /x/, and the phoneme /x/ is regularly expressed in writing by the said digraph. 23 Such digraphs may be termed UNAMBIGUOUS and MONOPOLISTIC. One can find in European written norms quite a number of polygraphs of this kind — see, e.g., the German digraph ie /i:/ and the trigraph sch /J"/; French ou /u/; French and Italian gn /ji/; etc. It should be added, of course, that we speak of polygraphs also 22

This fact has not only theoretical but also practical significance: any English text can be printed in any printing office throughout the world if that office has the basic stock of Latin characters available; a French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Czech, Slovak, Polish, etc. text, on the other hand, would require the possession by the printing office of special types which, as a rule, are not available. 23 Except for some instances of neutralization in word-final position, such as vrah /vrax/ 'murderer' where, however, the grapheme h has morphological justification (cf. Gen. sg. vraha, Instr. sg. vrahem, etc.)

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES O F THE W R I T T E N N O R M O F ENGLISH 5 1

in those instances where the phonemic correspondence to it exceeds one single phoneme, provided that this phonemic correspondence differs from the sequence of phonemes usually denoted by the graphemic components of the polygraph taken separately (see, e.g., the French oi, denoting /wa/); on the other hand, sometimes one single grapheme stands for a phonemic sequence (as, e.g., x /ks/ in many written norms), but such cases are relatively rare. The English polygraphs, if analysed from the viewpoint just indicated, will be found less handy than those we have enumerated in the preceding paragraph. At most, some of them are unambiguous (such as sh or wh), but many of them cannot claim even this quality (see, e.g., ow which denotes /au/, /au/, or /a/; th corresponding to either /0/ or /S/, and sometimes even to /t/); actually most of them are not monopolistic: /J/ can also be put down as ch, ssi, etc., /w/ also as w and u, /au/ also as ou, /au/ also as o, /a/ by -er, -a etc.; /S/ and /0/ alone may be put down only by th which, however, being ambiguous (i.e. standing both for /0/ and for /3/) leaves much to be desired for the qualification of a really handy tool of the written norm. 24 If, then, the correspondences on the basic level of English alone were to be taken as a criterion of the acceptable correspondence of the two norms, the qualification of the Modern English written norm would indeed be most unsatisfactory. Still, as has been shown above, the deficiencies found on the basic level are, at least to a degree, compensated by the correspondences ascertainable on higher language levels, mainly on the morphemic and word levels. This problematic situation of Modern English written norm can account both for the fact of the numerous proposals of some spelling reform that have been presented during the last four centuries and a half, and for the apparently surprising fact that all such proposals have so far been doomed to remain unsuccessful.25 24

For surveys of Modern English polygraphs see, e.g., NOSEK (1961) and especially BALINSKAJA (1964). Interesting comments on Modern English d i g r a p h s c a n n o w b e f o u n d i n HAAS ( 1 9 7 0 : 7 2 - 5 ) . 25

For an instructive survey of this effort see ZACHRISSON (1931); cf. also

VENEZKY ( 1 9 7 0 ) .

5 2 CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF THE WRITTEN NORM OF ENGLISH

It should be stressed emphatically that the obstinate persistence of the English written norm can hardly be explained away by sheer conservativeness of British life and customs; at most, this quality may have added some degree of intensity to this persistence. In principle however, here too, the main reason of this persistence should be looked for in the operation of the internal, not the external factors of language development: as we believe to have demonstrated earlier, the external factors may play some part in the development of language only if their influence is not incompatible with the structural needs and wants of the given language system (VACHEK 1962: 448). In other words, there must have been some structural prerequisites in the linguistic situation of English which have made this seemingly very complex and difficult relation of spoken and written norms work with relative, though by far not ideal, efficiency. Before discussing these prerequisites, however, let us consider in some detail what is really implied by the classification of some orthographic systems as easy or difficult. This question may be somewhat clarified if we recall what was said above of the coexistence of the two norms, spoken and written, in the consciousness of every member of the given language community who, as we put it, must be able, if need be, to switch over from the one norm to the other. Orthography was defined as the set of rules transposing the spoken utterances into the written ones. The simpler this set of rules is, the easier is, naturally, the orthography of the given language. But one should not overlook that this formulation expresses only the standpoint of that language user who is faced with the task of putting down the spoken utterances in writing (let us call him the writer). Somewhat different, however, is the situation of the language user who is faced with the task of deciphering written utterances (let us call him the reader). If the sole task of such a language user were indeed to transpose written utterances into corresponding spoken ones, he would probably find the set of rules acceptable to the writer just as acceptable to himself. But it is obvious that in culturally advanced language communities the matter is by far not so simple.

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF THE WRITTEN NORM OF ENGLISH 53

As may be deduced from our analysis given above, the reader is with increasing frequency faced with a situation which does not demand for the transposition of the written utterances into the spoken ones (that is, loud reading) but for rather quick silent understanding of the content mediated to him by written utterances, without what we have called above the detour via corresponding spoken utterances. This task, which is becoming more and more primary in advanced cultured communities, stresses that quality of the written norm which in our definition given above is denoted as "quick and easy surveyability" (cf. p. 13). It is exactly this quality which enables the written utterance "to speak quickly and distinctly to the eyes": to secure this quality written norms often deviate from the correspondences on the basic level of language in the direction of logographic and/or morphological correspondences. From all this follows that some of the difficulties of the orthographic system are due to the fact that such systems must serve both categories of language users — the reader as well as the writer, and that the interests of the two are far from identical. It thus appears obvious that the task of proposing an acceptable kind of spelling reform consists in harmonizing the requirements of the two categories of language users. This, naturally, is rather an arduous task and any proposal of a spelling reform has to be examined and evaluated in the light of the question how it satisfies this somewhat complex requirement. On the different approaches characterizing the writer and the reader, see also, most recently, HAAS (1970: 50-3, 76). To go back again to the structual relation of the Modern English spoken and written norm, one must not overlook one particularly important feature of the latter which very substantially contributes to the operation of the so-called logographic principle in it. It is the existence in the written forms of words of the "mute graphemes", i.e. of such as have no phonemic counterparts in the spoken norm (as examples of them may be adduced the grapheme b in the above-mentioned forms debt and doubt, or the graphemes c and u in victuals). It should be pointed out, however, that not all

5 4 CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF THE WRITTEN NORM OF ENGLISH

mute graphemes can be placed on the same level: some of them, such as the final -e in ModE mate, mete, site, and cute (as opposed to mat, met, sit, and cut) have a very definite referential function on the phonemic level, i.e. to "indicate the free pronunciation of the preceding syllabic nucleus" (VENEZKY 1970: 55). FRIED (1969) uses a special term for this type of the final e-grapheme, calling it a "diacritical grapheme"; his use of this term was inspired by some earlier passages in FRANCIS (1958) and Joos (1960). A different but still well-definable function is performed by the mute e-grapheme in ModE live, love, some, etc., in which, according to FRIED (1969: 65), this grapheme "prolongs the written word"; VENEZKY (1970: 59) classifies it as one of the "markers of graphotactic patterns"; this function is especially noticeable in what otherwise would be non-formal 26 'two-letter words' (which are avoided in Modern English written norm), such as doe, rye, toe, and see (cf. VENEZKY 1970: 57; FRIED 1969: 65). — One thing seems to be rather important: unlike the instances of mute graphemes like b and c in debt, doubt, and victuals, in which they clearly rank as foreignisms, the "diacritical grapheme -e" has become in Modern English a feature which is now employed both in the native and in the foreign strata of the lexicon and can, therefore, be qualified as one of the basic, fundamental constituting elements of the Modem English written norm. 27 26

As is well known, formal words like to, of.\ do, no, so, be, etc. are not subject to the tendency directed against the "two-letter words" (the non-formal go accepts its further letters at least in the very frequented form of 3rd pers. sg. ind. pres. goes, just like do, which, however, is used mostly in its formal function). It appears that the early users of the English written norm unconsciously felt the difference of the non-formal and formal words and expressed the distinction between the two categories by the susceptibility of the former, and non-susceptibility of the latter, to the tendency directed against the two-letter words. And it appears perfectly natural that the words of the former category, semantically more concrete and thus more essential for communicative purposes than the words of the latter category, were to symbolize their greater semantic and communicative weight by a more impressive graphemic extent of their written forms (in a way, this may be taken for an instance of a kind of iconic functioning of the written norm of English). 27 The importance of this feature is not contradicted by the relatively numerous exceptions found to it in the Modern English written norm (such as have, live

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF THE WRITTEN NORM OF ENGLISH 5 5

Our above remark on some of the mute graphemes characterizing the foreignisms in the Modern English written norm needs some more detailed elaboration. Already MATHESIUS ( 1 9 3 5 ) pointed out that one of the signals of synchronically foreign words in English is constituted by a relation of the phoneme and the grapheme which differ in principle from the phoneme-grapheme relation in words evaluated as synchronically domestic (thus, e.g., the digraph ch in domestic words is usually associated with the phoneme /tjy, while in synchronically foreign words it denotes /k/ or /J"/). After MATHESIUS, this fact was established independently in VENEZKY ( 1 9 7 0 ) ; the interesting thing is that, until quite recently, the transformationally oriented phonologists had not realized the existence of the two different strata in Modern English vocabulary. Not even the latest contributions have always managed to realize that, in fact, the English written norm comprises, as it were, two subsystems of correspondences between phonemes and graphemes, one characteristic of the synchronically domestic, the other for synchronically foreign lexicon. In this respect, then, the inner differentiation of the written norm of English appears to be closely parallel to that of the spoken norm of that language. But one can ascertain another most interesting parallel among the basic levels of the two norms of English. Just as the analysis of the phonemic structure of English discovers a number of phonic facts functioning as obvious signals of the speaker's emotive approach to the extra-lingual reality referred to by the spoken utterance (the long consonant phonemes, as in nno, llove, can be adduced as a typical specimen of such a signal), so the analysis of the written structure of English can establish some graphemic features endowed with an analogous signalling function (among other things, see particularly the word-initial digraph gh- in words like ghastly, ghost, ghetto, ghoul, etc., which undoubtedly underline the strongly negative emotional colouring love). Many of them are explained by the aversion of that norm to written words ending in simple -v; in such instances the "graphotactic" function, cosignalling the end of the written word, comes to assert itself with particular clearness,

5 6 CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF THE WRITTEN NORM OF ENGLISH

of the context referred to by these and similar lexical elements of Present Day English). This emotive reference of ModE gh-, incidentally, appears to have been overlooked in H A A S ( 1 9 7 0 : 7 3 - 4 ) . 2 8

28

Another case of using graphematic means for the differentiation of emotive versus non-emotive ("normal") approach to the communicated fact is adduced by D.L. BOLINGER, who confronts the contexts She had lovely grey eyes : It was a gray, gloomy day (BOLINGER 1946: 336). - He also very aptly points out the specific function of the written suffix -or (as opposed to -er, both corresponding to the phoneme /A/): as was demonstrated by Raven I. MCDAVID, the suffix -or can be qualified as "a visual morpheme of prestige" (MCDAVID 1942 : 7). - BOLINGER also points out the importance of what he calls "visual puns" (as in City Haul), of intentional misspellings and other phenomena documenting the ability of the written norm of language to signal, by its own specific means, emotive approaches to extralingual reality.

8 PROBLEMS OF THE ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM OF ENGLISH

All the remarks contained in the preceding chapter will have revealed to the reader, at least in part, the complexity and delicacy of the subject of the written norm of English and of the problem of English spelling reform, which cannot be successfully approached without taking account of the said complexity. And there can be hardly any doubt that until now most projects of an orthographic reform of English have not managed to come up to this requirement. It will be certainly useful to sketch here, in the very broadest lines, a casual survey29 of the effort aimed at establishing some closer relationship between the spoken and written norms, the effort which in English can boast of a very long, if unsuccessful tradition, extending for almost four centuries and a half. The terminus a quo of this reformative effort can be established in that period of the development of English in which the differences between the spoken and written utterances on the basic level of phonemes and graphemes began to stand out with particular clearness, i.e. at about the middle of the sixteenth century (according to R . E. ZACHRISSON, even earlier), and the regular flow of the reform projects was not to stop ever since. In the first three centuries one can distinguish, very roughly, two main subcategories of such projects. In the one group we find projects by reformers who wanted to make good for the obvious deficiency of the Latin alphabet used by the English by adding new 29

To the surveys adduced above (cf. footnote 25) should also be added the

c o n d e n s e d b u t v e r y i n s t r u c t i v e p a s s a g e s i n BAUGH ( 1 9 5 9 : 2 5 0 - 7 , 3 8 8 - 9 2 ,

passim).

et

58

PROBLEMS OF THE ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM OF ENGLISH

symbols to it or by adding diacritical marks to the symbols already in use. In the other group we find the projects by those who saw the difficulties connected with such a procedure, and so preferred to adopt a different course, based on established usage, but making this usage more systematic by abolishing as many of its irregularities as possible. Already in the latter half of the sixteenth century we finds these two groups of projects represented by outstanding figures: the first of the two by William BULLOKAR (with his A booke at large, for the amendment of orthographie for English speech of 1 5 8 0 ) (BULLOKAR 1 5 8 0 ) , the other by Richard MULCASTER'S The first part of the elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung of 1 5 8 2 (MULCASTER 1582). Specimens of these two approaches to the given problem were then to be found represented all through the four centuries during which the problem was to be tackled. We are not going to enumerate the long series of writings registered and analysed by earlier writers (ZACHRISSON 1 9 3 1 , DOBSON 1 9 6 8 , VENEZKY 1 9 7 0 , etc.). We want just to comment very briefly on some of the particularly important representatives of the two groups who have presented their projects in the course of the present century. In the first of the groups we should mention, first, the so-called (Initial Teaching Alphabet), devised by Sir James PITMAN and taught, experimentally, in a number of British schools: its purpose is to introduce British children to reading (cf. PITMAN 1 9 6 9 : 2 6 - 8 ) . In this alphabet 21 new non-roman symbols have been provided for those phonic values which cannot be unambiguously put down by traditional roman characters. Pitman is convinced that this alphabet not only makes initial teaching and learning of reading much easier but that also the children who have been instructed in this way can very easily pass over to reading in traditional orthography. Of course it remains to be seen whether this claim is justified; also the difficulties connected with providing new symbols for print can hardly be overlooked. Still, among the recent specimens of reform projects belonging to this first group the greatest attention not only of linguists but also of the general public was aroused by the phonetic script completely I.T.A.

PROBLEMS OF THE ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM OF ENGLISH

59

independent of the traditional alphabet which was construed in England on the initiative of G.B. SHAW.30 The great playwright had bequeathed a fairly large amount of money for the purpose of establishing and propagating such an alphabet. After the opposition of other legal heirs to this point of SHAW'S will had been overcome, it became possible to publish in the new alphabet, devised by Kingsley READ, SHAW'S comedy Androcles and the Lion (SHAW 1962), as SHAW himself had planned it. Still, nobody took this episode in the history of the effort at English spelling reform (in this case, at a brand-new alphabet) very seriously, on account of economic non-feasibility and for its complete breach with European cultural and civilizational traditions — the great attention attaching to it was due more to the popular figure of the deceased donor than to the curious cause this donor had so obstinately been fighting for. Much more serious and also more interesting proved to be those proposals which are to be classed with the other of the two categories. Within the limits of our century, the first such proposal was formulated by the Simplified Spelling Society, an organization founded in 1908 by the distinguished British Anglicists, W.W. SKEAT and D.F.J. FURNIVALL (its American counterpart, the Simplified Spelling Board, had been established two years earlier). The Society managed to secure the sympathies and cooperation of many distinguished linguists, such as Henry SWEET, Walter RIPMAN, Sir James MURRAY, and others; RIPMAN, together with William ARCHER, published in 1911 the Society's Proposals for a simplified spelling of the English language (RIPMAN - ARCHER 1911). In principle, the proposal aimed at a systematization of spelling by generalizing one of the graphic ways of putting down each phoneme, but this principle was not adhered to consistently. The inconsistency of the proposal, together with the unresponsiveness of the general public, and the shortage of funds after the death of the first Maecenas of the Society, Sir Andrew CARNEGIE, 80

For more details on SHAW'S last will, see FRIED (1963) and MacCARTHY (1969b).

60

PROBLEMS OF THE ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM OF ENGLISH

in 1919, resulted in the slackening of the Society's activity in the late nineteen-twenties. Its work was to be revived only in the following decade; in this second period of the Society an important part was again played by W. RIPMAN, by two outstanding phoneticians, Daniel JONES and W. Lloyd JAMES, and by the well-known dialectologist, Harold ORTON, who also prepared the new edition of the Society's booklet (RIPMAN - ARCHER 1911), this time under the title New spelling, being proposals for simplifying the spelling of English without the introduction of new letters (RIPMAN ARCHER 1940). The proposal keeps the well-established Modern English digraphs and adds to them a number of new ones (such as dh for the voiced fricative [