scholarly journals On roman letters and other stories

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-172
Author(s):  
Charles Lock
Keyword(s):  
Letter Writing ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Roman Alphabet ◽  
Athanasius Kircher ◽  
Roman Letter

This essay questions the assumption that the roman alphabet is more purely phonetic than any other, and that other scripts and writing-systems are less efficient, whether for the production of texts or for their comprehension. Those who habitually use roman letters are asked to consider their competence to understand other writing systems. The work of Stanley Morison emphasizes the ideological significance of alphabets and of particular letter-forms. M.B. Parkes and Paul B. Saenger are cited to indicate how punctuation and spacing are aspects of the roman-letter writing system that cannot be treated as purely phonetic. Beyond the world of roman letters there is a focus on Syriac and the Xi’an stele, which was printed by Athanasius Kircher in 1667 and marks the first publication in the west of a substantial text in Chinese.

scholarly journals The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piers Kelly ◽  
James Winters ◽  
Helena Miton ◽  
Olivier Morin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Theory Point ◽  
Roman Letter ◽  
Iconic Representations ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Naturalistic Pictures ◽  
Over Time

A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus the iconic ox’s head of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinear and unidirectional progression. According to this progressivist formula, pictorial scripts will tend to become more schematic while their systems will target smaller linguistic units. Objections to this theory point to absent, fragmentary or contrary paleographic evidence, especially for predicted transitions in the underlying grammatical systems of writing. However, the forms of individual signs, such as the letter A, are nonetheless observed to change incrementally over time. We claim that such changes are predictable and that scripts will, in fact, become visually simpler in the course of their use, a hypothesis regularly confirmed in transmission chain experiments that use graphic stimuli. To test the wider validity of this finding we turn to the Vai script of Liberia, a syllabic writing system invented in relative isolation by non-literates in ca. 1833. Unlike the earliest systems of the ancient world, Vai has the advantage of having been systematically documented from its earliest beginnings until the present day. Using established methods for quantifying visual complexity we find that the Vai script has become increasingly compressed over the first 171 years of its history, complementing earlier claims and partial evidence that similar processes were at work in early writing systems. As predicted, letters simplified to a greater extent when their initial complexity was higher.

Florian Coulmas, The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems. Oxford (UK) & Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996. Pp. xxvii, 603. Hb £65.00, $74.95.

1999 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-454
Author(s):  
Janet S. (Shibamoto) Smith
Keyword(s):  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Personal Favorite ◽  
The World ◽  
Pleasant Surprise ◽  
The Devil

What is alloglottography? A diaeresis? A digamma? Whose writing system has kanamajiri writing and kokuji? How would you start to find any of these in a conventional writing system text/reference, unless you knew where (in the world) to start? What about opisthograph, ostracon, quoc-ngu, and tugra? None are in the index of Daniels & Bright 1996, which I consider the best book to date on the world's writing systems. But all are entries, cross-referenced to other entries, in Coulmas's Encyclopedia. The reader can also look up Bamum writing, Djuka syllabic writing, the Hatrene script, Hsi-hsia writing, the Loma syllabary, Peguan script, Tifinagh, Urartian writing, and the Wolof alphabet directly, without having first to know what set of writing systems, geographical or typological, they belong to. My personal favorite is Sogdian writing (471–74), an Aramaic-derived script used by Persian colonists in Chinese Turkestan; the cursive form of this writing system is attributed to Ahriman the devil, because it is so hard to distinguish the letters. What a pleasant surprise, for one satiated with discussions of the weaknesses and unnecessary complexities of Japanese writing!

How young children make sense of two different writing systems: Korean written in the Hangul alphabet, and English written in the Roman alphabet

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyung Min Nam
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Shallow Orthography ◽  
Roman Alphabet ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Teaching Setting ◽  
Deep Orthography

Although many young children become literate within an environment in which different writing systems exist, there is little research on what children know about different writing systems and how they understand and develop them when they are learning more than one simultaneously. This qualitative study discusses how Korean EFL (English as a Foreign Language) children understand two different writing systems, the Korean alphabet, Hangul, and the Roman alphabet, used for English, within a peer teaching setting. The findings show that they were able not only to discover key orthographic principles which characterise each writing system but also to find similarities and differences between Hangul and English from different points of view: shapes of letters (block shaped vs linear), language units (syllables vs letters) and sound–letter relationship (shallow orthography vs deep orthography). The paper suggests that young children are able to look for key concepts in different writing systems by constructing their own ideas about the principles of reading and writing from an early age as active language learners.

A survey of diacritic restoration in abjad and alphabet writing systems

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANKLIN ỌLÁDIÍPỌ̀ ASAHIAH ◽  
ỌDẸ́TÚNJÍ ÀJÀDÍ ỌDẸ́JỌBÍ ◽  
EMMANUEL RÓTÌMÍ ADÁGÚNODÒ
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Evaluation Metrics ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
The World ◽  
Intractable Problems

AbstractA diacritic is a mark placed near or through a character to alter its original phonetic or orthographic value. Many languages around the world use diacritics in their orthography, whatever the writing system the orthography is based on. In many languages, diacritics are ignored either by convention or as a matter of convenience. For users who are not familiar with the text domain, the absence of diacritics within text has been known to cause mild to serious readability and comprehension problems. However, the absence of diacritics in text causes near-intractable problems for natural language processing systems. This situation has led to extensive research on diacritization. Several techniques have been applied to address diacritic restoration (or diacritization) but the existing surveys of techniques have been restricted to some languages and hence left gaps for practitioners to fill. Our survey examined diacritization from the angle of resources deployed and various formulation employed for diacritization. It was concluded by recommending that (a) any proposed technique for diacritization should consider the language features and the purpose served by diacritics, (b) that evaluation metrics needed to be more rigorously defined for easy comparison of performance of models.

scholarly journals The Chinese Script in the Chinese Scriptworld

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Visual Language ◽  
Chinese Script ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

The exclusivist ideology characterizing the Chinese writing system as “ideographs” was constructed in the West, and later reimported into China where it influenced popular and nationalistic understandings of the characters. For the West, the Chinese script held out the promise, embraced particularly eagerly by the literary and artistic worlds, of a visual language not complicated by questions of sound, and thus by the arbitrary impositions of individual languages (Bush). For China, the Chinese script came to function as one of the key cultural characteristics marking the Chinese off from the rest of the world (Shen). This paper will attempt to provide some conceptual groundwork for understanding these complex and overlapping discourses, and set out the fundamental graphological basis through which the differing functions of Chinese characters in both the historical and the contemporary Chinese Scriptworld (Handel) can be understood.

Prevalence of Suicidal Ideation in Sri Lanka

Crisis ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudath Samaraweera ◽  
Athula Sumathipala ◽  
Sisira Siribaddana ◽  
S. Sivayogan ◽  
Dinesh Bhugra
Keyword(s):  
Suicidal Ideation ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
General Population ◽  
Suicide Attempts ◽  
National Average ◽  
The West ◽  
Suicide Methods ◽  
Suicide Rates ◽  
Completed Suicide ◽  
The World

Background: Suicidal ideation can often lead to suicide attempts and completed suicide. Studies have shown that Sri Lanka has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world but so far no studies have looked at prevalence of suicidal ideation in a general population in Sri Lanka. Aims: We wanted to determine the prevalence of suicidal ideation by randomly selecting six Divisional Secretariats (Dss) out of 17 in one district. This district is known to have higher than national average rates of suicide. Methods: 808 participants were interviewed using Sinhala versions of GHQ-30 and Beck’s Scale for Suicidal Ideation. Of these, 387 (48%) were males, and 421 (52%) were female. Results: On Beck’s Scale for Suicidal Ideation, 29 individuals (4%) had active suicidal ideation and 23 (3%) had passive suicidal ideation. The active suicidal ideators were young, physically ill and had higher levels of helplessness and hopelessness. Conclusions: The prevalence of suicidal ideation in Sri Lanka is lower than reported from the West and yet suicide rates are higher. Further work must explore cultural and religious factors.

Psychology from Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic Perspectives

1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fouad A-L.H. Abou-Hatab
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Islamic Perspective ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
Western Psychology ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

This paper presents the case of psychology from a perspective not widely recognized by the West, namely, the Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic perspective. It discusses the introduction and development of psychology in this part of the world. Whenever such efforts are evaluated, six problems become apparent: (1) the one-way interaction with Western psychology; (2) the intellectual dependency; (3) the remote relationship with national heritage; (4) its irrelevance to cultural and social realities; (5) the inhibition of creativity; and (6) the loss of professional identity. Nevertheless, some major achievements are emphasized, and a four-facet look into the 21st century is proposed.

Searching for new Sources of growth. Are the Developing Countries Catching up with the Developed ones?

2015 ◽  
pp. 30-53
Author(s):  
V. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Gdp Per Capita ◽  
The West ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Divergence ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Relative Standing

This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western nation, was nearly 5 times higher than the world average and 2 times higher than in Western Europe. Since 1950 this ratio stabilized - not only Western Europe and Japan improved their relative standing in per capita income versus the US, but also East Asia, South Asia and some developing countries in other regions started to bridge the gap with the West. After nearly half of the millennium of growing economic divergence, the world seems to have entered the era of convergence. The factors behind these trends are analyzed; implications for the future and possible scenarios are considered.

Comparing Comparisons: Political Implications of Different Notions of Difference

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Location Point

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.

Squatting: The Fight for Decent Shelter, 1970s–1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Housing Needs ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.

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