Graphemics and the History of Phonology

Abstract

Summary It has often been said that the invention of the alphabet marked the beginning of phonology, in a prescientific sense of the word of course. On the other hand, it has also been said (F. Balk-Smit Duyzentkunst 1978) that "the phoneme concept would never have been developed without the alphabetic script". Apart, however from this ‘chicken-or-egg’ problem the assumption of Mrs. Balk is in itself a sign that something has been changing in linguistics the last decade or two. Writing has come into the picture again. Linguistic structuralism was based exclusively on spoken language, but, thanks to the work of such scholars as H. J. Uldall, J. Vachek and W. Haas, the insight has grown that writing is worth studying also linguistically. If this is so, the following question arises: What remains of the above mentioned relation between phoneme and alphabet (or vice versa) if T.G.G. is right in saying that a phonological level corresponding to a psycholinguistic reality does not exist (Chomsky & Halle 1968)? Mrs. Balk has proved in her article that, in any case the notion ‘phoneme’ does exist and that certain specifications and elaborations of this concept contain alphabetic alements, though most orthographies are morphono-logical and not merely phonological. The history and science of writing (I J. Gelb’s ‘grammatology’) also teach us that not only the alphabetic but also the syllabographic scripts were from the beginning already of a morphonological kind. Especially such grammatologists and semitists as Gelb and E. Reiner have drawn attention to the use of what they call ‘morphographemics’ (= morpho-phonemic spellings) in the ancient Akkadian writing system. And G. M. Schramm, J. C. L. Gibson, S. Morag and others did the same with regard to Classical Hebrew. So, perhaps, we are safe in concluding that there is some unconscious operation of a morphophoneme concept in the human mind.