LING 270

Language, Technology & Society

Homework for Unit 2

Handed out: Monday January 28, 2008

Due, in class, Monday February 4, 2008

 

  1. (5 points) You encounter a writing system that seems to have 50 basic symbols. What kind of writing system is this most likely to be? Explain. Note that there is more than one possible reasonable answer: you should justify your conclusion with an argument of the form 'there are too few symbols for it likely to be an X', or there are 'too many for it to be a Y'. One thing to bear in mind is that phoneme inventory size varies a lot across languages; similarly for syllable inventory.
  2. (10 points) The following (made up) writing system is an example of a 'hieroglyphic' style writing system that encodes both sound and meaning. Each line contains a written form, its pronunciation, and its English gloss. For each word, identify the meaning and sound components, and what each symbol probably denotes. For the semantic components it is sufficient to identify roughly what kind of thing it denotes: e.g., something that occurs with names of animals might mean something like ANIMAL. For the sound component, you should be able to tell me what kind of sound system we are dealing with here:
    1. syllabic?
    2. 'alphabetic' (representing every sound)?
    3. consonantal?
    4. some mixture of the above (why?)

You should be able to determine these by examining the various forms and noting commonalities among them. Assume that /a,e,i,o,u/ are the vowels and everything else is a consonant.

 

 

                How would the following words probably be written?

zaanti 'wolf'
kerema 'bread'
telfeni `cooked pumpkin'
niidu 'moth'
rakten 'gorge'
telfen 'pumpkin (plant)'
hemuw 'roasted grasshopper'

 

3        (10 points) Find a writing system that we have not described in class. A good source of information on this is www.omniglot.com. Describe the features of your writing system:

a.       What type of system is it?

b.      How is sound represented?

c.       How are the symbols arranged (is it purely linear as in the Latin alphabet, are vowels and possibly some consonants marked as 'diacritics'?)

d.      What language(s) is it used to represent?

e.       What is the origin (assuming this is known)?