История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 26 стр.

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string of syllabic graphs may be read in a number of different ways. Reading of

such a script would rely upon the reader's prior knowledge and ability to work

from the context, along with some guesswork.

Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal

value of a syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. Such a system, therefore,

would represent the syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. Such scripts

have graphs for consonant sounds but not for vowel sounds, with the result that a

certain amount of guesswork is involved in determining which syllable is being

represented. This ambiguity, however, should not be overemphasized. When a

consonantal system is used to represent a language like English, in which vowels

differentiate root morphemes (in English, pat, pet, pit, pot, put are all different

morphemes), discarding the vowel results in a highly ambiguous written

expression that can be understood only by a reader who already had a good idea of

the content of the written message. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and

Arabic, the absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because

in these languages vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes.

Vowel differences mark inflections, such as tense and aspect that, while of some

importance to the representation of meaning, are both more readily recovered from

context and less likely to change the overall meaning. The failure to notice the

intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure of the language and the

type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the efficiency of

consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the

invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture.

Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the

language. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, but a

syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called

phonemes. The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the syllable into its

underlying consonant and vowel constituents. The economy of representation

comes from the fact that a large number of syllables can be generated from a small

set of these constituents. An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and five vowels