Chapter 11 – Orthography development
297
3.5. Choosing graphemes
This section briefly discusses the issue of choosing graphemes, using again
the example of the Miraña orthography, some aspects of which were dis-
cussed in Section 3.2 above. In Miraña, these choices were determined by
the Mirañas’ sociopolitical relations to two other speech communities
which have established orthographies: The Colombian national society,
whose language is Spanish, and the Boras, who speak a linguistically very
close variant of Miraña (Thiesen 1996: 11, 20; Seifart 2005: 22f.). A first
noteworthy characteristic of Miraña orthography is that all of its graphemes
are based on Spanish letters. Some of the Miraña graphemes are modified
versions of Spanish graphemes, either in their visual graphic form or their
phonetic value, as can be observed in Table 3. Miraña speakers also de-
cided to modify the visual appearance of some (Spanish-based) graphemes
used in Bora. This can be understood when taking into account that the
Mirañas have long struggled to be recognized as a separate ethnic group
with respect to the more numerous Boras. Table 3 gives a good impression
of the two main conflicting factors that are at work when choosing graph-
emes: that of adhering to conventions of already known and established
orthographies of surrounding languages, and that of giving an orthography
a decidedly different appearance in order to fulfill an emblematic function
for the speech community.
4. Conclusion
The previous sections have shown that orthography development involves a
rich interaction of the characteristics of linguistic systems and a variety of
non-linguistic factors. Structural properties of languages often allow for a
number of alternative options of orthographic representation of a given
feature. These options may correspond to a phonemic representation, but
they may as well correspond to a more abstract representation (morpho-
phonemic) or to a more superficial representation (phonetic). These alterna-
tive options may favor different potential users of the orthography. The task
of the orthography developer is to balance the advantages and disadvan-
tages of these options and find a workable compromise.
298
Frank Seifart
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for comments from Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Ulrike Mosel,
Nikolaus Himmelmann, Julia Borchert, Jost Gippert, and the audiences at
the DoBeS summer school in Frankfurt in 2004 and at the Instituto Caro y
Cuervo in Bogotá in 2005, where much of the contents of this chapter was
presented in seminars. I am also grateful to Peter Austin, Natalia Eraso,
Doris Fagua, Elsa Gomez-Imbert, Camilo Robayo, and Maria Trillos for
providing examples (along with discussion), not all of which are repre-
sented in this chapter. Thanks also to Falk Grollmus for providing the Chi-
nese example.
Notes
1.
Further theoretical possibilities to typologize writing systems, such as direction
(left, right), axis (horizontal, perpendicular), or lining (top to bottom, bottom to
top), are usually disregarded since they yield no insightful classifications.
2.
Morphographic systems are sometimes also called “logographic” or “ideo-
graphic”. Both terms are inappropriate because the units represented in these
writing systems are always morphemes, and not words in the sense of units
that could be modified by inflection, as the term “logographic” suggests. As a
matter of fact, there are no writing systems that represent words in this sense,
even though in case of highly isolating languages, such as Chinese, words tend
to be monomorphemic. Furthermore, graphemes always refer to linguistic units
and never directly to extra-linguistic concepts, as the term “ideographic” sug-
gests.
3.
In many cases, the spelling of morphemes is constant in different contexts de-
spite pronunciation differences because the spelling represents an older stage of
the language, when these forms were in fact pronounced in the same way. Be-
cause such spelling conventions make explicit the etymology of words, phe-
nomena such as the English examples 1–3 can be called “etymological writ-
ing”. The French orthography – which displays very complex correspondences
to pronunciation – also contains many examples of etymological writing.
4.
Additionally, for many Chinese signs it may be claimed that they include com-
ponents with an exclusively phonetic value (Coulmas 2003: 56ff.). This is a
further phonographic aspect of this writing system.
5.
Note that information about word classes can also be directly represented in an
orthography, for instance by capitalization of nouns, as in German.
6.
Similar issues apply to the orthographic representation of syntactic units, such
as phrases and sentences, which are often orthographically represented with
punctuation.
Chapter 12
Sketch grammar
Ulrike Mosel
Introduction
The role of the sketch grammar in a language documentation project has not
been investigated yet so that this chapter is based
on general considerations,
discussions with colleagues, and the experiences I made when working on
the documentation of the Teop
1
language on Bougainville in Papua New
Guinea. The chapter starts with a typology of sketch grammars, showing
how the various types of sketch grammars differ from fully-fledged refer-
ence grammars, and then in Section 2 describes which demands language
documentation sketch grammars (LDSGs) should meet in terms of com-
prehensiveness, accuracy, and user-friendliness. The content of LDSGs and
its relation to the lexical database and the annotated recordings is discussed
in Section 3 Theoretical issues such as the role of grammatical analysis and
description in language documentation projects, or the relationship between
grammaticography and lexicography will not be touched.
2
1. Types of sketch grammars
There are at least five types of sketch grammars:
1.
the preliminary grammar that presents the very first account of a lan-
guage’s structure on the basis of a small corpus;
2.
the introductory grammar chapter that accompanies the treatise of a spe-
cific
research topic;
3.
the summary of a large reference grammar;
4.
the grammar in the front matter of a dictionary (dictionary grammar);
5.
the sketch grammar of a language documentation.
While the content of the preliminary grammar heavily depends on what
kind of data the authors were able to collect and
analyze
3
, the author of an