English and Chinese Orthography

1. English and Chinese Orthography Instructor: Tsueifen Chen

2. Introduction to English and Chinese orthography • English is categorized as alphabetic language while Chinese is categorized as morpho-syllabic language. • English and Chinese have different writing system. • As a result, learning English and Chinese requires different processes and skills.

3. English orthography • The modern English alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 26 letters. Of the 26 letters, 5 letters (i.e. a, e, i, o, u) represent vowels, and 21 letters represent consonants. • English letters (or graphemes) basically represent phonemes. • Learning to read English requires forming connections between graphemes and phonemes.

4. What is a phoneme? • Phoneme: a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two words. e.g. cat vs. bat /k/ vs. /b/; pat vs. mat • English has 26 letters, 40 phonemes (25 consonant sounds and 15 vowels) • See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography

5. What is grapheme? • Grapheme: a grapheme is a minimal unit in a writing system • Graphemes are the letters and letter combinations forming patterns found in words e.g. /i/: e (me), e-e (scheme), ee (greet), ea (seat), ie (thief), y (lady), ey (alley), ei (ceiling)

6. Phoneme-grapheme correspondence • One-to-one correspondence e.g. tip, cat, • One-to-two correspondence (a single phoneme with two graphemes): digraphs e.g. book, ship, meet • One-to three correspondence (a single phoneme with three graphemes): trigraphs e.g. schilling, beautiful Some exceptions: “box” has 4 phonemes /b/ /a/ /k/ /s/ and 3 graphemes; some say 4 phonemes and 4 graphemes

7. Definition of terms • A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme (distinct sound), or else a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. • A trigraph is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined.

8. Exercise Group assignment • Find out the 40 phonemes of English, • Give students some words and ask them to figure out how many phonemes are there in those words.

9. Chinese orthography • Chinese is categorized as a morpho-syllabic language. • The basic writing units of the Chinese writing system are characters. • Each character represents a morpheme morphologically and a syllable phonologically, which is why it is a morpho-syllabic language.

10. Chinese orthography continues… • The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. • The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change.

11. What is a morpheme? • A morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic in a word. • In Chinese, 水 is a morpheme which has meaning. As a result, every Chinese character is a morpheme. • In English, the word ‘unbreakable’ has 3 morphemes: un, break, able. .

12. Chinese characters and words • Characters are the basic writing units of Chinese. • Chinese words are formed by combining characters, and are usually one-, two-, or three-characters, such as 水 (water),氣球 (balloon),太空船 (spaceship). • 60 percent of Chinese words are of two characters.

13. Advantages and disadvantages of logographic writing system • Separating writing and pronunciation The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes aren't linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that one doesn't need to understand the pronunciation or language of the writer to understand it. The reader will recognize the meaning of 1, whether it is called one, ichi or wāḥid in the language of the writer. Likewise, people speaking different Chinese dialects may not understand each other in speaking, but can to a significant extent in writing even if they don't write in standard Chinese. Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan prior to modern times, communication by writing (筆談) was the norm of international trade and diplomacy.

14. Advantages and disadvantages continue… • This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from the pronunciation. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram

15. Learning Chinese • Since logograms are visual symbols representing words rather than the sounds or phonemes that make up the word, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words, while it might be relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of logograms.

16. Learning Chinese • According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in PRC's "Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese" (现代汉语常用字表) cover 99.48% of a two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the "Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters" (常用國字標準字體表) by the Ministry of Education of ROC, while 4,759 in the "Soengjung Zi Zijing Biu" (常用字字形表) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong, both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education.

17. Learning Chinese continues… • Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combination of two or more already-learned characters. The significance of this is that, after a relatively short term of education, the learning of Chinese language for its native speakers can become faster and easier, as they no longer have to spend much time in memorizing reading and writing of a new word, but rather have to memorize its meaning.

18. Comparisons between English and Chinese • In alphabetic languages, letters are meaningless symbols that represent sounds; whereas in Chinese, the semantic radical gives hints at the meaning of the character. • Knowing 4,300 Chinese characters would be considered necessary for full literacy. • 1.5 Chinese character = 1 English word • Learning the two languages requires different method.

19. Exercise • Ask students to think of some Chinese words that are one-character, two-character, three- character, and four-character.