Some Remarks on the Use of Garšūnī and Other Allographic Writing Systems by the Melkites

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 278-298
Author(s):  
Johannes Pahlitzsch
Keyword(s):  
Group Identity ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
Prestige Language

Abstract The aim of this paper is to address the question to what extent and for what reasons the Melkites, especially of Southern Syria and Egypt, resorted to allographic writing systems, of which garšūnī, the writing of Arabic with Syriac letters, was only one mode. Indeed, various languages such as Greek, Arabic, Syriac and Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) coexisted in the Melkite community, which is characterized by its linguistic diversity. Melkite garšūnī texts can be dated to between the 11th and the late 13th centuries. While the Melkites were not the first to use garšūnī, this mode of writing was in this period far more widespread among them than in the other oriental Christian communities and not limited to notes and colophons, also including liturgical texts and probably a poem on the Mamluk conquest of Tripoli. Other allographic writing systems were also used by the Melkites, such as writing Arabic in Greek characters, Greek in CPA script or Greek in Syriac script. Consequently a rich, very versatile corpus of allographic writing modes was employed by the Melkites between the 9th and 13th centuries for different kinds of texts. Thus the idea that the use of a specific allographic mode can be attributed to the desire to express a sense of group identity or to the reverence for a specific sacred language seems not generally applicable for the Melkites. At different times and places various Melkite groups had different preferences, because there was no single Melkite prestige language. Therefore it is necessary to establish for each case the respective reasons for the application of a certain allographic writing system.

An Error Analysis of Hiragana and Katakana Writing Systems in the Learning of Japanese as Third Language at UiTM

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Norhazlina Husin ◽  
Nuranisah Tan Abdullah ◽  
Aini Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Foreign Students ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
The Other ◽  
Japanese Language ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Main Challenge

Abstract The teaching of Japanese language as third language to foreign students has its own issues and challenges. It does not merely involve only teaching the four language skills. Japanese language has its own unique values. These unique values also tend to differentiate the teaching of Japanese language as a third language from other third language acquisitions. The teaching of Japanese language as third language to foreign students also involves the teaching of its writing system. This makes the teaching of Japanese language rather complicated because Japanese language has three forms of writings, namely: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Students are required to fully understand the Hiragana system of writing first before proceeding to learn the other two forms of writings. The main challenge in the teaching of Japanese writing systems is the time allocated that can be considered as very limited as other language aspects need to be taught too. This, which relates directly to students’ factor very much contribute to the challenges foreseen. Students are likely to face problems in understanding and using the writings as they simultaneously need to adhere to the findings teaching and learning schedules. This article discusses on the analysis conducted in terms of the learning of the Hiragana and Katagana systems of writing among foreign students. The discussion in this article is based on the teaching of Japanese language to students of Universiti Teknologi MARA(UiTM), Shah Alam. Keywords: Third language, Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji

In search of the perfect orthography

2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Venezky
Keyword(s):  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
International Phonetic Alphabet ◽  
Experienced Reader ◽  
Cultural Considerations ◽  
Advanced Stages ◽  
One To One ◽  
The One ◽  
Psychological Processing ◽  
The Ideal

Philologists, linguists, and educators have insisted for several centuries that the ideal orthography has a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme. Others, however, have suggested deviations for such functions as distinguishing homophones, displaying popular alternative spellings, and retaining morpheme identity. If, indeed, the one-to-one ideal were accepted, the International Phonetic Alphabet should become the orthographic standard for all enlightened nations, yet the failure of even a single country to adopt it for practical writing suggests that other factors besides phonology are considered important for a writing system. Whatever the ideal orthography might be, the practical writing systems adopted upon this earth reflect linguistic, psychological, and cultural considerations. Knowingly or unknowingly, countries have adopted orthographies that favour either the early stages of learning to read or the advanced stages, that is, the experienced reader. The more a system tends towards a one-to-one relationship between graphemes and phonemes, the more it assists the new reader and the non-speaker of the language while the more it marks etymology and morphology, the more it favours the experienced reader. The study of psychological processing in reading demonstrates that human capacities for processing print are so powerful that complex patterns and irregularities pose only a small challenge. Orthographic regularity is extracted from lexical input and used to recognise words during reading. To understand how such a system develops, researchers should draw on the general mechanisms of perceptual learning.

Albert Schweitzer and the Jews

2014 ◽  
Vol 107 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-398
Author(s):  
James Carleton Paget
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Long Life ◽  
The One

Albert Schweitzer's engagement with Judaism, and with the Jewish community more generally, has never been the subject of substantive discussion. On the one hand this is not surprising—Schweitzer wrote little about Judaism or the Jews during his long life, or at least very little that was devoted principally to those subjects. On the other hand, the lack of a study might be thought odd—Schweitzer's work as a New Testament scholar in particular is taken up to a significant degree with presenting a picture of Jesus, of the earliest Christian communities, and of Paul, and his scholarship emphasizes the need to see these topics against the background of a specific set of Jewish assumptions. It is also noteworthy because Schweitzer married a baptized Jew, whose father's academic career had been disadvantaged because he was a Jew. Moreover, Schweitzer lived at a catastrophic time in the history of the Jews, a time that directly affected his wife's family and others known to him. The extent to which this personal contact with Jews and with Judaism influenced Schweitzer either in his writings on Judaism or in his life will in part be the subject of this article.

Multilingualism in Metropolitan London

English Today ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reinier Salverda
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Language Management ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
University College London ◽  
The Common

A description and discussion of the vast linguistic diversity in the capital of the United Kingdom.LONDON today is an enormous Tower of Babel, where in addition to the common language, English, many other languages are spoken. On Tuesday 13 March 2001, as part of the Lunch Hour Lecture Series at University College London, Professor Reinier Salverda discussed the linguistic diversity of contemporary London, presenting recent data on the other languages spoken there, as well as focussing on the social aspects of this linguistic diversity, in particular issues of language policy and language management. The following is a slightly adapted version of that presentation.

The Re-ethnicisation of Politics in Myanmar and the Making of the Rohingya Ethnicity Paradox

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Hein
Keyword(s):  
Group Identity ◽  
Ethnic Origin ◽  
Authoritarian Regime ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
Violent Acts

In Myanmar, hostilities between the majority Burmese and the minority Rakhine people on one side and the minority Rohingya on the other side have been common, but violence has persisted and even increased during the unstable transition away from an authoritarian regime. Most Burmese citizens appear to be united behind the ruling elites on the Rohingya issue. Why is the violence assumed to be of ethnic origin and whose interests are served by the acceptance of such violent acts as routine events? The article attempts to seek answers by following Brass’s framework on Hindu–Muslim violence in India. Its purpose is to examine which actors, mechanisms and institutional developments have been dominant and significant in the re-ethnicisation of the political landscape in Myanmar and how this has consolidated the formation of a contentious and contested specific Rohingya group identity among many Arakanese Muslims.

The relation of vowel letters to phonological syllables in English and German

2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-234
Author(s):  
Martin Neef
Keyword(s):  
Side Effects ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Language System ◽  
English I

Assuming that a writing system is inevitably dependent on a language system, the main function of written representations is to give access to the basic representations of the language system. In this paper, I want to deal with graphematic phenomena, i.e. the relations of written representations to corresponding phonological representations. In particular, I will delve into the relation of written representations to the phonological factor of the number of syllables, based on data from English and German. Though in these languages, there is neither a specific written element relating to the syllable number nor an isomorphic relation between vowel letters and the number of syllables, two questions are worth examining: Can a word have more syllables than vowel letters? Can a word have less syllables than uninterrupted sequences of vowel letters? The first question will be answered positively for both languages although there are some severe differences to be stated; the second question will be answered positively only for English. I will show that these results are side-effects of more basic regularities of the writing systems under consideration.

scholarly journals Revitalising Naxi dongba as a ‘pictographic’ vernacular script

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
Duncan Poupard
Keyword(s):  
Future Development ◽  
Yunnan Province ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Standard Chinese

A script can be a window into a language and all the culture contained within it. China’s minority peoples have a multitude of scripts, but many are in danger of falling out of use, a decline spurred by the adoption and promotion of standard Chinese across the country. Nevertheless, efforts are being made to preserve minority writing systems. This article reveals how the primarily logographic Naxi dongba script (often labelled the world’s ‘last living pictographs’), used in China’s southwestern Yunnan province to record the Naxi language, can be practically used as a modern writing system alongside its more widely known traditional role as a means of recording religious rites, and what exactly separates these two styles of writing. The efforts that have been made to achieve the goal of modernisation over the past decades are reviewed, including the longstanding attempts at Unicode encoding. I make some suggestions for the future development of the script, and employ plenty of examples from recent publications, alongside phonetic renderings and English translations. It is hoped that overall awareness of this unique script can be raised, and that it can develop into a vernacular script with everyday applications.

scholarly journals Neurocognitive Basis of Dyslexia in Different Writing Systems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Liu ◽  
James R. Booth
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Dyslexia ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing ◽  
Alphabetic Writing

An important issue in dyslexia research is whether developmental dyslexia in different writing systems has a common neurocognitive basis across writing systems or whether there are specific neurocognitive alterations. In this chapter, we review studies that investigate the neurocognitive basis of dyslexia in Chinese, a logographic writing system, and compare the findings of these studies with dyslexia in alphabetic writing systems. We begin with a brief review of the characteristics of the Chinese writing system because to fully understand the commonality and specificity in the neural basis of Chinese dyslexia one must understand how logographic writing systems are structured differently than alphabetic systems.

scholarly journals As Visões. Exegese e hermenêutica do livro do Apocalipse, cc. 4–8

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (255) ◽  
pp. 571
Author(s):  
Isidoro Mazzarolo
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Other Hand

Apesar dos avanços científicos e humanos, as visões ainda são algo enigmático. Quando alguém afirma ter tido uma visão, facilmente é tratado como alucinado. No Apocalipse, as visões são o centro do texto, e todo o texto é considerado uma revelação e não uma loucura. A visão pode ser uma luz para a análise de conjuntura ou para o direcionamento profético de pessoas e comunidades. O trabalho que apresentamos quer ressaltar a visão do Cordeiro (Ap 4–8) com sua linguagem codificada, mas de extrema importância para a vida das comunidades cristãs do final do I e início do II século d.C. Por outro lado, queremos ressaltar a importância das visões como momentos de esclarecimentos, de intuições e verdades reveladoras para pessoas ou comunidades.Abstract: Despite all scientific and human progress, visions are still a mystery. Those who claim to have had a vision are immediately regarded as insane. In the Apocalypse, visions are at the heart of the text and the whole text is seen as a revelation and not as a sign of madness. The vision may be an insight helping the conjuncture analysis or the prophetic guidance of people and communities. The work we present here wishes to emphasize the vision of the Lamb (Ap 4–8) with its codified language, but of extreme relevance for the life of Christian communities in the end of the first and beginning of the second centuries A.D. On the other hand, we would also like to emphasize the importance of visions as moments of enlightenment, of intuition and of revealing truths for people and communities.

scholarly journals RULE-BASED SYLLABIFICATION OF KOREAN WORDS WRITTEN IN LATIN USING DETERMINISTIC FINITE AUTOMATA MODELS

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-85
Author(s):  
Rouly Doharma Sihite ◽  
Aditya Wikan Mahastama
Keyword(s):  
Success Rate ◽  
Statistical Approach ◽  
Markov Models ◽  
Finite Automata ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Test Results ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Research Focus ◽  
Finite State ◽  
Catch Up

Transliteration is still a challenge in helping people to read or write from one to another writing systems. Korean transliteration has been a topic of research to automate the conversion between Hangul (Korean writing system) and Latin characters. Previous works have been done in transliterating Hangul to Latin, using statistical approach (72.2% accuracy) and Extended Markov Models (54.9% accuracy). This research focus on transliterating Latin (romanised) Korean words into Hangul, as many learners of Korean began using Latin first. Selected method is modeling the probable vowel and consonant forms and problable vowel and consonant sequences using Finite State Automata to avoid training. These models are then coded into rules which applied and tested to 100 random Korean words. Initial test results only 40% success rate in transliterating due to the nature that consonants have to be labeled as initial or final of a syllable, and some consonants missed the modeled rules. Additional rules are then added to catch-up and merge these consonants into existing proper syllables, which increased the success rate to 92%. This result is analysed further and it is found that certain consonants sequence caused syllabification problem if exist in a certain position. Other additional rules was inserted and yields 99% final success rate which also is the accuracy of transliterating Korean words written in Latin into Hangul characters in compund syllables.

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