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Which languages, living or extinct, have dysfunctional writing systems? By that I mean, it is difficult even for a literate native speaker to tell the meaning or pronunciation of a word from the way it is written.
Question
#62230. Asked by pu2-ke-qi-ri. (Feb 02 06 9:49 PM)
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Arpeggionist
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Hebrew and Arabic meet the requirements. The thing with Semitic languages is that only the consonants are written (and occasionally the vowels). For the purpose of clarification for children and readers of Scripture and poetry, a system of vowel markings does exist in the form of diacretic marks (known in Hebrew as "nikkud" - dotting). But even the greatest minds in the Hebrew speaking world make plenty of mistakes when applying these dots to the written text. Though the system is taught to high schol students as part of their final exams in grammar.
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Arpeggionist
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I should point out that it is this method of consonant writing that makes earlier Semitic and Egyptian writing so easily prone to misunderstanding and mispronounciation. (One example I could think of is the word "pharaoh", which, if read properly in its original language, is pronounced "Par-'OH". Or names like Nebuchadnezzar, Shalman'etzer, or Tzophnat-Pa'neah'.)
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bloomsby
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I'm not sure that English really fits the bill. A ***literate*** native speaker usually knows or can 'tell the meaning or [and] pronunciation of a word from the way it is written', with the exception of some proper nouns.
It's important not to exaggerate the problems of English spelling, though they are real enough.
On the other hand, English lacks transparency in the structure of its vocabulary. For example, in practice, one generally needs some knowledge of Latin to unpick the meaning of a word like 'controversy' as the roots aren't English. This may help account for the astonishing prevelance of malapropisms and related mistakes. For example, not long ago, I was solmenly informed that 'incredulous' means 'not worthy of credit' (!). The speaker had seized on the root 'cred-' and was clinging to it like a desperado.
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Baloo55th
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Some English words depend on context for interpretation. Take 'lead'. Is is 'leed' as in take someone somewhere, or 'led' as in a heavy metal? Context will make it clear usually, though. Chinese is an odd case. You can't tell the pronounciation of a character as pronounced by the writer, but you can tell the meaning. All Chinese (OK, there are two writing systems - Mainland and Taiwan basically - reformed and old) is written the same way. A character will mean 'man' even though it is pronounced differently in Mandarin and Cantonese. Apart from that, probably the most dysfunctional in the sense of the question is Naxi from Yunnan in China. In the old 'writing' system, which somewhat resembles a cartoon strip, a box of characters makes a 'sentence', and the characters don't represent sounds but ideas. A crescent shape is a negative, and other characters can be used in punning ways which involve sounds (as in a representation of 'father-in-law' containing a monkey's head as the word for monkey is similar to part of the word for father-in-law). Worse than hieroglyphics which are bad enough. An even worse case would be the quipu strings used by Inca messengers, where the strings contained no characters at all but in some way I've never understood acted as memory aids.
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mementoflash
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1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was
time to present the present.
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) After a number of injections my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
Yes, a "literate native speaker" can generally know the meaning of such words by context, but at times "it is difficult".
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Flynn_17
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German's not the greatest in that you have to be able to tell what's going on at all times to get the jist of a sentence. The only one that springs immediately to mind is the following sentence.
Den Hund hat meine Oma gebissen.
Der Hund hat meine Oma gebissen.
While the bottom one is self explanatory, the top one means that my Grandmother actually bit the dog. The dative tense is the only way that you'd work this out. German also has the horrible way of shoving a lot of verbs to the end. Sentences of up to 80 words long can be constructed and until you get to the end when ten verbs are all huddled together, you have no idea what the hell is going on. These case systems help sometimes, but there are occasions where you can't use them and have to wait til the end to decipher the meaning.
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lanfranco
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I think we've moved from the original question, which concerned writing systems, to spelling and vocabulary, grammar and syntax, and even phonology, which are rather different issues. A "literate" native speaker of English or German is not going to have much difficulty with the examples given; he or she will be sophisticated enough to grasp context quickly, even in a highly-inflected language like German or one that, like English, contains many words and phonemes that are spelled alike but pronounced differently in different contexts.
I think Arpeggionist's and Baloo's responses address the question directly. I wonder, too, about some dead languages, such as Sumerian and Akkadian.
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lanfranco
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I might add that the "writing system" of most western European languages is the same for each. Excluding Modern Greek, and allowing for accents and diacritical marks, we all use the Roman alphabet.
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pu2-ke-qi-ri
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When I posted the question, I had Urdu in mind. It's an Indo-European language using a Semitic writing system, which doesn't write out vowels. The lack of vowels are less of a problem in Semitic languages because the consonants can hint at which consonants can be used. Also, there are no divisions between words. This has caused literate native speakers (or so my linguistics prof. says, and I have no reason to doubt him) to say that they have no idea what somebody wrote to them!
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pu2-ke-qi-ri
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About ancient languages, I don't know much about Sumerian or Akkadian, but I do know Hittite. It can be very difficult for someone nowadays reading Hittite to figure out the pronunciation of a word from the way it is written. In Hittite spellings, several consonants and vowels are not distinguished in the way you'd expect. Also, the Hittites could use Sumerian or Akkadian ideograms, and sometimes they do that so consistently we don't have the remotest idea of the phonetic shape of a Hittite word! And so on and so forth. But I don't know how much this was a problem for a trained scribe, or any other literate individual.
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Baloo55th
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Of course Japanese is another language written in the 'wrong' system. It is multisyllabic like English, but written in a mixture of ideograms derived from Chinese (kanji) and a combination of two syllabary systems (hiragana and katakana). It would work perfectly well in Roman characters, or even dropping the kanji ideograms entirely, but they seem to like it. The kanji characters are pronounced differently according to context, by the way. And people complain about English!
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Baloo55th
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Just picked up on the Western writing in Roman characters apart from the Greeks - how about the Serbs, Macedonians and Bulgarians, not to mention the Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians?
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soonappear
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Lest we forget that all Japanese words can be written using hiragana whereas kanji can represent an entire word.
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lanfranco
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Well, Baloo, I tend to think of them as Eastern Europeans, which is why I didn't include them. We had also been talking about English and German among European languages.
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Baloo55th
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Why don't the Greeks count as Eastern European then? Just asking....
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Baloo55th
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Actually, if you are saying Urdu, you must also include Farsi and Pashto which are also Indo-European and written in Arabic script. Also Dari, Tajik and Kurdish. Then you have languages like Avar which is a Caucasian language originally written in Arabic script, then in Roman characters and currently in Cyrillic....
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lanfranco
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That's not a bad question, Baloo -- but do you want me to say that I'm suffering from "cultural prejudice"?
I think that if you polled most individuals on the subject, Greece would be included among western European countries -- perhaps for bad reasons, I am quite willing to admit, given the country's history and location.
Ukraine, however, to take one example (and it is my husband's ancestral homeland, so I asked him his views) would be categorized as "eastern European."
But it's true, or so I've been told, that the Cyrillic alphabet was influenced by the Greek.
Now, what about Sanskrit and Hindi ... ?
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Baloo55th
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Definitely Indo-European and in an Indo-European script - a descendant of Brahmi. Hindi is written in Devanagari (as are Nepali and Marathi) and most commonly so is Sanskrit even though it can be printed in many different scripts from that region. Apart from the problem I find in distinguishing the characters hanging from the washing line (not being Indian myself) there shouldn't be the problems Urdu would seem to have - Urdu being as close to Hindi as Serb is to Croat.
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pu2-ke-qi-ri
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Well, not quite. The issue is of mutual intelligibility. From what I hear, the main difference between Serb and Croat is the writing system. With Hindi and Urdu, the basic vocabulary is the same-- but the technical (and I suppose I could also say "educated") vocabulary is different. Hindi borrowed words from Sanskrit; Urdu borrowed words from, I forget if it was Persian or Arabic. So while two street vendors would have no problems conversing between Hindi and Urdu, a Hindi speaker would find it hard or impossible to understand a lecture given by an Urdu speaker, or vice versa.
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pu2-ke-qi-ri
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Also, Tajik is currently written in Cyrillic. One of my friends took Tajik a few years ago.
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Baloo55th
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Sorry about Tajik. Serb and Croat are written in different systems, but have quite a lot of different words. Bosnian is written in Roman characters, and has differences to both Serb and Croat. The word for bread is, I think different in all three. Urdu has been influenced by Farsi, which in turn has been influenced by Arabic. And Turkish - the word Urdu itself comes from Turkish and is from the same origin as horde (as in the Khanate of the Golden Horde. Urdu is (the language of the) camp.
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