Jeremiah: 0:04

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to How to Language, a podcast about language learning for learners of language. We said we'd be back in January, and we are just barely holding to that promise. It is January 31st, last day of January. We hope that everybody had a good last few weeks. We certainly did. Today we're going to be diving into writing systems. There are different writing systems of different languages, how they're different, why they're different, why it matters for you as a language learner, and some ways that you can more easily learn new writing systems in the new languages that you learn. With all that said, let's dive in.

Marina: 0:40

Alright, we're back.

Jeremiah: 0:41

We are so back.

Marina: 0:42

Uh, it's the new year, and we figured that a lot of people might have made a New Year's resolution to learn a new language. If so, congratulations.

Jeremiah: 0:55

Big time.

Marina: 0:56

And there's a good chance that if you are learning a new language this year, that language might have a different writing system than maybe what your first language uses. So we thought it would be kind of fun to kick off 2024 by talking about writing systems and learning new writing systems.

Jeremiah: 1:14

Big time. I think when people start learning another language or they are thinking about learning another language, you know, it's hard to visualize a new writing system, and so usually when other languages are, like, visually represented, it's in the form of their writing systems, like, you know that this is a, ooh, a multilingual thing because it has the word hello in English and then it has, like, a Chinese character and a hieroglyphic, you know.

Marina: 1:39

[Marina laughs] A hieroglyph?

Jeremiah: 1:39

Like, languagey, you know, languagey motifs. You know, it's really hard to represent language as anything else, I guess.

Marina: 1:45

Alright, so, we say the term writing system, and that is an accurate term to describe how a language is written down, but the technical term for it, like the word that we use in linguistics, is orthography. Do you know the roots on that word?

Jeremiah: 2:01

I bet I do.[Marina laughs] Um, I mean, graph is like writing. And, Orth, I think is hand.

Marina: 2:07

Really? Oh, okay.

Jeremiah: 2:09

Is it not?

Marina: 2:09

Are you making that up?[chuckles]

Jeremiah: 2:11

Well, I'm, I'm, it's an educated guess.

Marina: 2:13

Uh huh. I'll, I'll look it up.

Jeremiah: 2:15

Cause there's like, well, there's orthopedics, orthopedic surgeons work on your hand and your foot. Are you looking it up?

Marina: 2:21

Yeah. From the Greek, orthos meaning correct.

Jeremiah: 2:25

[incredulously] Ah, what?

Marina: 2:27

And then the second part, yeah, is to write.

Jeremiah: 2:29

Oh, wow. That's embarrassing.

Marina: 2:31

That's odd.

Jeremiah: 2:32

To write. Okay, so, orthography means correct writing. Which is kind of funny because it's like already coming at you with correct or incorrect, trying to make you feel bad.

Marina: 2:41

Interesting. Weird. All right. So orthography kind of encompasses all of the stuff that you see when you see a language that is written down, right? These are things like spelling, the actual graphemes, the, the units of writing. In English, for example, that would be letters. Spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, so if the language has spaces or not, between words, punctuation, periods, commas, semicolons, etc. All of those make up an orthography.

Jeremiah: 3:17

Yeah, and the reason writing system is a good a good synonym is because it really is a system. Like, a system is not just a collection of things, but a collection of interrelated things that all have distinct relationships between them, and so in a writing system it's not just the letters and the punctuation and the capitalization and and all the rules but all those things really fit together like puzzle pieces. And so you know it would be silly to learn English writing by just learning the letters and not the punctuation because the punctuation is a part of the writing, even, even though the punctuation marks themselves don't stand for like a sound you make in the language. It's still part of the system. Interestingly, punctuation isn't like a given for orthographies. Like, for example, Latin had kind of some punctuation, but it wasn't really consistent. And Latin also didn't have spaces. Classical Latin.

Marina: 4:13

Yeah, I remember my Latin teacher telling us that when Latin was being written down, like, during, like, Roman times, you had to just, know when a sentence ended and began. You had to just, like, based on the grammar, be able to understand those sentence breaks.

Jeremiah: 4:30

Yeah. Which, you know, might, I don't know, might have something to do with the way that Roman, the Roman saw language, which I think I've talked about, which is that. That for them, language was a spoken thing and writing was just a way to contain it. And so they probably figured, well, you know, there's no spaces when you speak. If you really look, I mean, obviously they didn't have the technology to look at, you know, the, the wavelengths or whatever[both laugh] of, of spoken sound, but I mean, there is truth to that, that spaces are kind of an optical illusion almost, or an auditory illusion. But that's neither here nor there. The point is English has spaces. Lots of languages has spaces.

Marina: 5:07

Japanese doesn't have spaces.

Jeremiah: 5:08

Really? Oh, see, there you go. I'm always finding interesting ways that Japanese and Latin are weirdly similar. It's important to distinct, to distinguish orthography from phonetics because at least for English learners, we're kind of brought up to believe that we write things the way they sound, which is true to a certain extent, but surprisingly not as much as you would think. The relationship between how, well first of all, the relationship between how words are written, the orthography of the language, and how they're spoken, the phonetics of the language, what you actually hear, first of all, it's arbitrary, right? Letters, or characters, they can look like things, but at least for English, the letters just look like what they look like. Like, nothing about A is meant to look like the sound A or ah, if that makes sense. You know, for other languages, the letters might tell you more about what they look like, what they sound like. So for example, Korean has an alphabet. It works differently from ours, but each symbol. does represent a sound and believe it or not they're actually meant to look like the shape that your mouth makes when you make that sound which is kind of fun.

Marina: 6:17

But that was done very deliberately, like, the person who invented Hangul did that on purpose because that made sense, right?

Jeremiah: 6:24

That's right.

Marina: 6:24

All writing systems had to be invented and some of them were invented with different things in mind. and so, that's where it gets into what we would call transparent or opaque orthography. Sometimes it's also referred to as shallow or deep orthography. They mean basically the same thing.

Jeremiah: 6:46

The orthography of a language, for some languages will look like how it sounds, whether you take that super literally like Korean, where it literally looks like the shape that your mouth is making when you say the sounds, or something like Spanish, which each letter more or less pretty consistently corresponds to a single sound or a couple of different sounds depending on the context. But for Spanish, if you know the alphabet and you know what each of those letters signify and the rules for writing, then you can pretty consistently and reliably figure out how a word is pronounced in Spanish if you can see it written down. Believe it or not, the same kind of goes for French. There are a lot more rules, and I wouldn't say that it's nearly as transparent as Spanish, but the rules are similarly consistent to Spanish, even though they're also inscrutable, in my opinion. No offense.

Marina: 7:40

Like, if you knew the rules for Spanish and French, then you could encounter an entirely new word, or even a gibberish word, in that language, and be able to pronounce it correctly.

Jeremiah: 7:52

That's right. And that's an example, those are examples of transparent. Or shallow orthographies, which isn't, shallow sounds like a mean word. It's, it's not, it's just the way that it is. And if you're learning the language, you might really appreciate that because it makes it easier to pronounce things. Whereas a language like English, English also has some, you know, spelling rules for This combination of letters makes this sound, except in this context, like, I before E, except after C, and also not in the words foreigner, or, uh, like a million other words.

Marina: 8:24

Or most of the words.

Jeremiah: 8:25

Most of the words. Yeah[both laugh] exactly. So, for English, you can have situations where the same spelling gives you a bunch of different sounds with no apparent rhyme or reason. You can maybe find a rhyme or reason if you look at the etymology of those words, but I think that is giving English a little too much credit. We can just look at it and say, hey, English, that's, you're just very opaque. You're not transparent at all. For example, cough. Laugh. Slew. Slough. Through, thorough. All these words end, or most of them end in pretty, in the same exact way, with the same, vowel and then last few letters. But, when you say them, they all sound different, because English is nowhere near as transparent or shallow as Spanish.

Marina: 9:13

If somebody were to encounter that set of words for the first time written down as an English learner, it And they were asked to pronounce those, they probably wouldn't be able to guess how they were pronounced based on the spelling alone. That makes it opaque.

Jeremiah: 9:28

Then if you have a language like, I don't know, would you say that Chinese is a pretty opaque language?

Marina: 9:33

Yeah, probably. I mean, I don't know a ton about it, but I get the impression that There isn't a lot about the characters that gives away phonetic clues. Maybe sometimes, but I think generally not. They might give semantic clues, but that might not give you an idea of how to actually pronounce it. It's the same thing with Japanese kanji, at least. you look at a character and you really have no idea how you would say it. so that would be an extremely opaque language, or opaque writing system.

Jeremiah: 10:03

And again, none of these speak to whether one language is better than another. It's, it's really just a question of how that language and its writing system have developed. You know, that writing system had to be invented or inherited from somewhere else. And whether it's opaque or shallow is just a question of, yeah, how, how, how developed. And it's not awesome for you as a learner if you have a really opaque writing system to learn, but people do it every day, so you can do it.

Marina: 10:29

Oh yeah. It's a challenge, but it's possible, for sure.

Jeremiah: 10:32

That's right. think an interesting thing to talk about before going further as to actually learning a new orthography, is to talk a little bit about orthographic history, and writing as a historical development, because what it, what it actually is, is a technology, believe it or not. It's a technology that had to be invented and each individual writing system also had to be invented. They didn't just drop out of the sky. Like, in other words, language, whether it's signed or spoken, comes naturally to humans. Both are equally natural because humans with adequate socialization and childhood, so they grow up around people speaking language, whether spoken or signed, will learn their first language automatically. But writing doesn't come naturally. Writing has to be taught and it has to be consciously learned. That's why if you don't teach someone to write and read at some point, they just won't know how. Because it doesn't come naturally. It's just like driving a car. Nobody knows naturally how to ride a car. You have to be taught. You have to learn. Also, lots of languages around the world don't have writing systems. and a lot of ones that do have writing systems didn't until they came into contact with a language that did have a writing system. So for example, the Cyrillic alphabet that Russian and other languages use was adapted from the Greek alphabet. Before that, they didn't have one.

Marina: 11:57

I don't think Korean had a writing system until it encountered Chinese.

Jeremiah: 12:02

Yeah, Korean used Chinese characters, and then only in, I think, the 14th or 15th century did, uh, the, did the king, whose name I'm blanking on. The king, funnily enough! He invented the writing system. Again, can't remember his name, but it's my favorite writing system by far. I love Hangul.

Marina: 12:20

I'm glad that we're talking about this because literacy is a research focus of mine within language acquisition. So literacy is the ability to read and write printed language. So, actually, like, words on a page. Having literacy is not an indicator of intelligence for the reasons that Jeremiah just said. It's not something that humans possess naturally. For the most part, the literacy rate in a population of people is determined by their level of access to education. and that access to education is highly dependent on economic and political factors. Systematic discrimination, especially against women, if they're not allowed access to education because of their gender. It could be the result of things like war and natural disasters that prevent people from going to school. If anything is to disrupt that access to education, they may not be able to access literacy education, and from there they may not develop quote unquote full literacy. They may know the alphabet and know a few words, but wouldn't be able to read a book, for example.

Jeremiah: 13:35

To take kind of a side tangent, I guess, and bring it back to video games, like we talked about last time, in the time since that episode came out, I found, or I was shown a video game called Chants of Sennaar, which is, I don't know, I have it on Switch, but it's on other things too. And it's cool because it's, it's, it's not, it's not a language learning game, like, you know, Duolingo, it's a it's a puzzle game about learning languages And it's really, really cool and fun if you're into that kind of thing, which if you're listening to us, then chances are, I think that you might be It's cool because it makes a really great survey of orthography stuff, because even though it's a language learning game, there's not actually any spoken language in the game. It's just writing. Writing is the stand in for language as a whole that you learn. And the object is to learn new languages through their writing systems. And you do that mostly from comparison between languages, through context where you're seeing words written down, and with significant, significant trial and error. Right? You can make guesses about what each letter means, and then test your hypothesis at the next puzzle, and then if you get it right, then you pass the puzzle, and you know that's what it means, and if you get it wrong, then you have to go back to the drawing board. But, the different orthographies in the game, showcase some of the range of writing systems, which is why I'm talking about it, because writing systems can differ from each other a lot, because they're inventions. And they're also not limited to the physical properties of the human mouth. You can do all kinds of stuff with a writing system. So that's why there are so many different looking ones. The main limitation in the game is that all the writing systems are pictographic, meaning each character represents a word or a grammatical function instead of being syllabic or alphabetical. So it's not exactly a one to one if you're trying to learn Cyrillic or Hangul or whatever. But I thought I'd mention it because we were just talking about video games. And it's very cool. And I'll talk about it later. But that does bring us to different kinds of orthographies. Because we actually haven't touched on it yet. So, we've talked about alphabets, which is what we have in English. In alphabets, the graphemes, or the letters, represent significant sounds and are combined to form syllables and words. So in English, the letter A corresponds to ah, or aw, or ay, right, there's that opacity again. But not all languages work like that. English does, Spanish, German, Latin, Georgian, Armenian, Korean, like we talked about, but there are several other types of orthographies. So what else is there, Marina?

Marina: 16:19

There are also syllabaries, which you could probably guess what that means based off of the name. This is where graphemes represent syllables, which are sound units consisting of at least one vowel and often also one consonant at the beginning or the end. So examples of syllables would be ah, ma, li, ku, sto. og[Marina chuckles], barn[both laugh].

Jeremiah: 16:50

Barn. I put barn there because it has three consonants. A B at the beginning, and an R, and an N at the end, and an A in the middle. But it's just as much a syllable as the first one, ah.

Marina: 17:03

Now I imagine that most syllabaries use a consonant vowel syllable structure, where it's a consonant and then a vowel, like ma or lee. I imagine.

Jeremiah: 17:13

That's true.

Marina: 17:14

So, languages that use syllabaries would be Japanese kana, specifically hiragana and katakana, Cherokee, Cree, and Mycenaean Greek. Turns out there's only a handful of syllabaries still in use, so, not very many examples there. So then we have logographic writing systems. You might also hear the word pictographic. They're not quite the same thing, but for the purposes of this discussion, they're essentially the same thing. So logographic writing systems use single characters that represent an entire word or idea or grammatical function. Examples would be Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, Japanese kanji, Mayan hieroglyphics, etc.

Jeremiah: 18:04

One that I really like is abjads. Abjads are writing systems, they're a lot like alphabets, but They only consist of the consonants, and maybe some optional vowel diacritics. And the reason that a language might use an abjad, is that, for example, in, well, okay, there are languages where the vowels harmonize with each other across the word or even beyond. And so you kind of already know what the vowel is going to be based on what the word is doing without actually needing to read it. And so it's not necessary to write the vowel. Of course, you could have languages where the vowels just, they don't get their own letters just because. Like, for example, some modes of Elvish in,[Marina laughs] in Tolkien's Middle Earth, his Elvish languages, there are several different modes of writing in Elvish, but some of them are Abjads because, well, yeah, because they don't have separate vowel, letters, separate vowel graphemes. They have diacritics, which maybe go on top of the consonants, but the consonants kind of get center stage. Yeah. Which is kind of fun.

Marina: 19:10

Diacritics are like additional markings that might go above or below a grapheme, that indicates some change to the default pronunciation or something like that. Japanese hiragana have diacritics when you turn, for example, ha into pa. You have the little circle above it. That's a diacritic. The umlaut above letters, that's a diacritic, the two dots, accents above letters, like in Spanish, those are diacritics.

Jeremiah: 19:41

Examples of languages that have abjads are, uh, Arabic, Hebrew, Phoenician. Those are the main ones I know about.

Marina: 19:49

Uh, and then the last main type of orthography is an abugida. And these ones are a little funny, they're somewhere between an alphabet and a syllabary, but also a little bit of an abjad. So basically in an abugida, vowels and consonants, like the graphemes that represent those are treated very differently. So they both exist, but consonants definitely take priority, kind of like an abjad. Each consonant has, like, a built in vowel. It has, like, a default vowel that if it stands alone, that's the vowel that it goes with. But you can change that vowel, usually with a diacritic. And unlike an abjad, I don't think it's usually optional. So it's not, like, vowel-less, like some abjads can be, um, but the vowels and the consonants are treated differently. Some examples of abugidas, they're very common in South and Southeast Asian languages. So for example, Tibetan, Burmese, Tamil, and Thai all use abugidas.

Jeremiah: 20:59

Great. So now that we've had ourselves a little survey of orthographic history and just what the heck orthographies are made of, let's talk about how you actually go about learning a new writing system. So say you're, your first language is English and maybe you've studied Spanish or French in high school but you're taking a stab at Russian or Korean or Chinese or Japanese or Tamil, and the first thing that you encounter is that, Hey, I can't read this.[both laugh] I can't even try to read this because the letters don't look anything like the letters that I'm familiar with. Or if they maybe kind of look a little like the letters I'm familiar with, like in Russian with Cyrillic, you still don't know what those letters actually sound like, because even though they look like the letters you're familiar with, they usually pretty much always are going to sound different. So you're seeing a new writing system and it's a little daunting, right? Because, okay, maybe in Spanish you can just dive right into the language itself, but if you don't know the writing system, you probably have to start there. At least with, in most cases, and it is true that it can be more difficult to learn another language if the writing system is different from the one you're familiar with, but you would be surprised how fast you can learn it. So I talked about Korean and its writing system Hangul. Some people say that the orthography of Korean can be learned in a day and mastered in a week which, really just I think speaks to how cool of an orthography it is because it makes a lot of sense. Go learn Korean! Go learn Hangul. It's really fun. But if you're if you're not learning Hangul, it might take a little bit longer, but at least in the case of, uh, some, you know, an alphabetic or syllab, syllabariotic[Marina laughs] language, maybe not quite so long. If you're learning a language that is logographic, like Chinese or Japanese kanji, yeah, you know, I'll level with you. That could take a while, but there are ways to deal with that.

Marina: 22:59

So, reviewing the literature on learning a new writing system, something really stands out, amongst all of it that we really wanted to emphasize here. Because writing is a technology, we've mentioned that a couple of times, it is not natural for us to learn. i. e. you won't just pick it up, right? You could argue that with spoken and signed languages, you could pick it up through implicit instruction, you know, meaning that you just kind of learn as you go, you don't read a textbook, you just kind of listen and, and learn that way. There could be an argument for that, but with writing and reading, you have to sit down and learn about how the writing system works. We call this explicit instruction. Whether it's reading a textbook, whether it's doing stroke order exercises, whether it's, you know, doing spelling tests for yourself, whether it's like learning every single letter or syllable or whatever it is for your particular writing system. Writing systems are not intuitive. They are completely arbitrary and you have to learn the rules. So what you could do is, this would be a good place to start, is learning about the characteristics of the writing system that you're learning. So is it a syllabary? Is it an alphabet? Is it an abjad? That'll give you a place to start, in terms of how to go about learning the writing system and how it works. Is it transparent? Is your life gonna be easy? Is it opaque? Is it gonna make your life a little harder?

Jeremiah: 24:42

I like to study a little of the history of the writing system. So, you know, the um, I don't know if that counts as etymology, but the history of why the writing system is the way it is, because that can provide some surprising insight. So, like, for example, to take it back to Hangul and Korean, once again, if you learn why the letters look the way they look, and you can start to visualize it, then I think it makes it easier to kind of bake in clues into the letters as to what they sound like. You know, you're giving yourself extra footholds if you build context around what you're learning, and that's true of anything.

Marina: 25:17

Another thing with learning writing systems is that, you know, we've talked about this before on this show where we don't recommend learning spoken and signed languages like a child would because we're adults and we just don't learn like children do. Our brains don't work like children do anymore. But with learning a new writing system, try learning a new writing system like a child would learn how to read and write. Because a lot of, teaching praxis was developed with children learning how to read and write their first languages. And the differences between teaching a child how to read and write and teaching, an adult how to read and write in a new language, honestly aren't that different. Like, you don't want to treat adults like children, but, like, the methods and the repetition and, you know, the types of practice exercises that you can do. You can use all of those same things, you know? When children are learning kanji and hanzi, they're doing stroke order exercises, they're writing them over and over again, like, you can do all that stuff too, and it's still going to be effective, because you're just learning the same technology. That is an exception to our, to our thing about learning like children do. You can learn a writing like a child would learn.

Jeremiah: 26:41

Yeah, I mean it kind of is an exception and it's kind of not because the way children learn a writing system is exactly what we're saying, which is that it is explicit, whereas the way they learn language generally is implicit. Grown ups don't really, don't really learn language that way, and we certainly don't learn writing that way, but what we have in common with the grown ups and the kids is that we all have to learn writing explicitly because it's a technology. In Chants of Sennaar, to bring it back to that game, you learn the orthography entirely through context and implicit learning and it's fun to learn in that way in that low stakes context of a puzzle game but it also takes hours to learn literally just a relatively small collection of characters. If you had explicit instruction on those characters you were told what they mean first of all the game wouldn't last more than an hour, and for a game, that's boring. But in real life, you don't want to waste hours and hours in confusion because you didn't take the time to learn the orthography. Once you do take the time to learn the orthography, you can just go about learning language like you normally would because now you've got that, you've got the cypher key in your brain where you can understand what all these symbols mean.

Marina: 27:56

So we're talking about explicit instruction and learning like a child would Well, how do you actually do that? How do you learn a new orthography? As with spoken and signed language, input and output. And in this context that would mean reading and writing. Most language learning software includes both for a good reason. Getting a lot of input and creating a lot of output. That works for learning how to read and write in a new orthography as well. and it's important to get both for the same reasons that it's important to get both listening and speaking practice. So, it's going to mean a lot of exposure and it's going to mean a lot of practice.

Jeremiah: 28:39

For logographic systems like Chinese, these orthographies have thousands of unique characters, so breaking it down into separate radicals and learning those will make your job easier. And maybe you're thinking, wait, what's a radical? Radicals, in a language like Chinese, or a writing system like Hanzi, which is the Chinese writing system, Radicals are the little pieces that those much more complicated characters are made up of. And even though there are thousands of characters in Hanzi, there are not nearly so many radicals. And the radicals are what make up those characters. The radicals themselves don't necessarily stand for sounds. They can do all kinds of different things. But knowing them and being able to recognize them, and knowing what they mean, because often they mean something or used to, can help you to recognize and identify and remember Chinese characters.

Marina: 29:30

Same thing goes for abjads and abugidas, learning the diacritics and what they mean, what they do to the base grapheme or the consonant, if that's what the case is, that can also be applied here.

Jeremiah: 29:45

Another thing about Chinese, really quick, just to bring it back to that, or, you know, Japanese kanji, is that having thousands of characters that you need to know in order to be able to read and write the language in daily life just makes it so that, unfortunately, you can't learn the orthography before learning the language itself like you could with Korean. You could learn Hangul, like I said, in a week without even actually knowing any Korean language itself. Um, but it would make then learning Korean a lot easier. You can't do that with Chinese. For Chinese in particular, it also has an alphabetic writing system that's based on the Latin alphabet called pinyin. And some advice that I once heard is to read the whole textbook or do the whole course in pinyin first. Then do it all over again from start to finish using the Chinese characters. It might seem tedious, but it's great review and it'll help keep you from getting overloaded trying to learn Chinese and Chinese characters at the same time because that's a lot to ask of yourself.

Marina: 30:46

And I think that that raises a good point about using your native writing system the writing system of your native language To help you learn the new writing system that you're learning There's nothing wrong with that, especially at first. Like, it's a good idea to use pinyin, or romaji if you're learning Japanese. You already have one writing system software OS installed in your brain. It's, it's a learning tool. It's a learning tool to help you learn other types of writing system software. So, don't be afraid to use it to help you, especially in the beginning. In fact, according to psychology, we do that whether we want to or not. Remember when we talked about synesthesia? Synesthesia mapping onto new writing systems was primarily based on your first language orthography and the colors that you associated with that. That kind of tells us that no matter what you do, you're always gonna kind of default to your first language writing system, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Jeremiah: 31:52

Yeah, because even so, with enough time and practice, whether you have synesthesia or not, the new writing system will begin to feel almost as natural as your native writing system.

Marina: 32:04

Exactly.

Jeremiah: 32:09

As usual, thank you for listening to this episode of How to Language on writing systems. If you like what we do, you can leave us a review on your preferred podcast platform. You can also follow us on Instagram at howtolang or x with the same handle. See you next time!