История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 27 стр.

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can generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000

consonant-vowel-consonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent a full

range of phonological differences. It is a script particularly suited to representing a

language in which morphological differences are marked in phonological

differences; it is less useful for a language, such as Chinese, in which one syllable

represents a large number of morphemes. For the Chinese language a logographic

system is more efficient.

No orthography is a pure system. The clearest example of logographic

writing, Chinese, consists not only of characters representing meanings but also of

secondary characters based on sound similarity for representing meanings that

were difficult to picture. It therefore relies upon both word-based and sound-based

principles. On the other hand, alphabets, which are primarily sound-based, also use

fixed letter strings to represent the same meaningful unit even if the pronunciation

of that unit varies in different contexts. So, for example, the common spelling for

the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and photography even though

they are pronounced somewhat differently. Conversely, alphabets often provide

different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical but

have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat,

meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the

reading process that some linguists have concluded that for an orthography to be

practical and efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for

each meaningful unit than for each sound unit.

The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of

cultural purposes required other developments besides the invention of a system of

characters for representing linguistic form. To facilitate fast and accurate

recognition, the form of writing was improved by introducing spaces between the

words, developing conventions for punctuation and paragraphing, and simplifying

graphic forms. This evolution continued through the invention of printing and the

invention of type fonts. And to exploit the aesthetic properties of the writing

system, artistic forms of writing were developed.