Orthographic Differences Research Articles

The Syntactic Adaptation of English Borrowings in Contemporary French

This article explores the syntactic adaptation of English borrowings in contemporary French, focusing on how these borrowings are integrated into French grammar. Language borrowing is a natural consequence of globalization, cultural exchange, and technological advancement, with English serving as a dominant source of lexical enrichment for French. Through detailed analysis of borrowed nouns, verbs, adjectives, and idiomatic expressions, this study examines the grammatical modifications necessary for integrating English borrowings into French, including gender assignment, verb conjugation, and sentence structure. The article also highlights the challenges posed by phonetic and orthographic differences, as well as the tension between linguistic purism and natural language evolution. Drawing comparisons with other languages, such as Polish and Spanish, this comprehensive analysis provides insights into the future of English borrowings in French and the broader implications of linguistic adaptation in a globalized world.

Rediscovered Fragments Shed New Light on a Proto-Masoretic Torah Scroll

After Edna Engel and Mordechay Mishor had discovered that two fragments with excerpts from the book of Exodus belonged to a single Torah scroll dating from the seventh or eighth century CE, Mordechai Veintrob identified thirteen additional fragments of the same scroll, most of them coming from the Cairo Genizah. This article shows that in the preserved fragments no orthographic differences occur with the (partially reconstructed) text of the more recent Aleppo Codex, while there are such orthographic differences with the other ancient Bible codices. The relationship between the ancient scroll and the Aleppo Codex is looser as far as the sectional division by means of petuḥot and setumot is concerned. However, the tradition according to which five specific lines must be written above the text of the Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1–19) seems to have this very scroll as its source. This tradition was followed in the Aleppo Codex and other ancient codices.

Nonword reading by adults who stutter in a transparent orthography

PurposeUsing word- and nonword-reading passages in Kannada, which has a transparent orthography, we attempted to determine (a) whether orthographic differences between English and Kannada may explain the observed differences in stutter rates on nonwords, and (b) whether longer nonwords, like words, incur higher rates of stutters. MethodsStutters are defined as sound or syllable repetitions, sound prolongations, broken words or nonwords (a pause within a word or nonword), abnormal pauses, and intrusive vowel-like sounds. Twenty-six persons, who stutter, read the word and nonword passages. The nonwords were created by changing the first syllable of each word; otherwise words and nonwords were equivalent in length and syllable structure. Stutters were counted from audio-recordings and statistically analyzed. ResultsPWS stuttered on words in varying amounts and in significantly larger amounts on nonwords. Stutter frequency increased roughly in proportion to the increase in the length of phonological words (previously known) and nonwords (reported for the first time here). ConclusionThe results cannot be attributed to the difficulty of pronouncing nonwords because Kannada orthography has a one-to-one relationship between the written and spoken forms of words. Speech production is a multi-stage process consisting of ideation, lemma selection, phonological word creation, and the articulatory planning and execution. Because nonwords lack meaning and clearly identifiable part of speech, it appears that stutters arise late in the speech production process at the phonological word formation and articulatory planning stages. Meaning, lexicality, and morphosyntax may not contribute significantly to the occurrence of stutters.

Semantic Versus Orthographic Preferences in Aphasia: Behavioral Evidence.

In this study, we compared the orthographic and semantic preferences of healthy adults and age and gender matched adults with aphasia, an acquired language disorder. Previous research in word retrieval and word associations has addressed semantic and phonological connections, but it has not as often included analyses of orthographic skills. We matched (on age and gender) 10 neurotypical adults and 11 older adults with aphasia and administered to both groups a lexical discrimination task requiring them to select, from 18 choices, those words that were most different from three words (daughter, laughter, son). Among the choices were foil words (e.g., daughter), orthographic similarities (laughter) and semantic similarities (son). Results revealed that individuals with aphasia focused on orthographic differences, while healthy adults chose semantic differences. Further studies should further explore this orthographic focus to develop treatment strategies, using behavioral and objective measures, for word-finding deficits in aphasia.

The Impact of Phonological and Orthographic Processing on Reading Speed in Russian-Speaking Children

Phonological and orthographic processing are reported to be among the strongest predictors of reading development across different Indo-European languages. The relative impact of these factors can be modulated by cross-linguistic script and orthographic differences, as evidenced by many studies in European languages. The present study investigates the effect of phonological and orthographic processing on reading speed in 6- to 12-year-old (1 – 5 grades) Russian-speaking children (N = 117), taking into account age as a factor as well. Phonological and orthographic processing were assessed with behavioral tests. The results revealed that both skills predict reading speed in Russian. Moreover, the age of young readers can also be a non-linguistic predictor of reading speed in Russian, especially in children between 6 and 10 years old. Children aged 10 to 12 also demonstrated some variability in reading speed, although an increase in reading speed was no longer observed.

Strategies of Teaching Writing at Saudi Tertiary-Level Institutions: Reality and Expectations

Teaching writing in English is a particularly daunting task for EFL teachers. Much of it concerns teaching accuracy in text production, development and thought expression which is usually not the teachers’ stated aim. Thus, teachers’ perceptions to the teaching of writing and the actual classroom practices need examination, which is the aim of this study, a prerequisite to recommending pedagogical changes to bridge the gap that exists between educational aims and outcomes so far as the teaching of writing to EFL learners in Saudi tertiary level educational institutions is concerned. The study applies a quantitative approach via a survey conducted with one hundred EFL teachers at Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMBSIU, henceforth), Qassim University and King Khaled University, Saudi Arabia. Results suggest that inadequate English resources and inefficient teaching methods are, in general, the main causes of poor writing skills. Further, the teachers perceive limited lexis, irregular sentences, and orthographical differences with the mother tongue as impediments in the learners’ ability to write well in English. The study concludes with some pertinent recommendations to remedy the situation.

Foreign schriftdenken in ausbau languages

AbstractThe concept ofschriftdenkendescribes how the knowledge of a writing system in use guides the creation of a writing system for a yet to be standardized language. Trubetz­koy described this effect with reference to the invention of the Glagolitic alphabet in the 9th century with Greek as the reference writing system. This paper demonstrates schriftdenken and measures to increase orthographic differences in two writing systems with a relatively young history: Luxembourgish (a Germanic language) and Rusyn (a Slavic language). In the Luxembourgish context, schriftdenken and orthographic separation are revealed by the historical context, whereas in the Rusyn context, both practices are related to different geographic contact situations in the countries where Rusyn is spoken and written. The reference languages for Luxembourgish are German, French and Dutch; for Rusyn, they are Russian, Ukrainian, Church Slavonic, Polish and Slovak.

Two Sumerian incantations against migraine (sag̃-ki-dab-ba) on amulets and cuneiform tablets

This paper discusses two Sumerian incantations against headache (sag-ki-dab-ba) preserved on cuneiform medical tablets from the Neo-Assyrian and Late Babylonian period, as well as on two cylinder-shaped stone beads discovered in the royal tomb II. in North-West Palace at Kalhu. The importance of the incantations is twofold. First, they provide an example for the practical use of medical incantations. Second, the two incantations were an integral part of two medical series from the first millennium: the UGU series and the Mussu’u series. The previous editions of the incantations (Bock 2007, Schuster-Brandis 2008 and Al‑Rawi 2008) did not take into account all known manuscripts, and this has led to some misunderstandings. In this paper I present not only a new edition of all relevant cuneiform texts but also discuss the textual and orthographical differences between the various manuscripts, as well as the ritual context of the incantations.

Visualizing Collation Results

How can the results of automated collation facilitate the analysis of witnesses’ relationships? This article introduces the tool PyCoviz, designed to process a collation obtained with CollateX, focusing on the scholarly need to detect shared errors and unique errors. The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus serves as a case study to show how PyCoviz allows to reproduce an editor’s conclusions on the manuscript tradition. While analyzing the collation of Calpurnius’ text, this article discusses the difficulty of comparing orthographic differences, and how PyCoviz could be improved to deal with incomplete witnesses, or to visualized editorial uncertainty.

Orthographic Advantage Theory: National advantage and disadvantage due to orthographic differences

Orthographic Advantage Theory: National advantage and disadvantage due to orthographic differences

L1 Orthography in L2 Chinese Morphological Awareness: An Investigation of Alphabetic and Abugida Readers

The current study aimed to explore the effect of first language (L1) orthography on second language (L2) Chinese morphological awareness. One hundred and twenty-nine students (61 L1 English readers and 68 L1 Thai readers) who studied Chinese as a second language participated in this study. They completed four tasks of morphological awareness (morpheme segmentation, morpheme discrimination, compound structure discrimination, compound structure analysis) and two control measures (reading vocabulary tasks). Drawing upon MANCOVA analysis, the study revealed that Thai readers outperformed English readers on compound awareness after the effect of L2 reading vocabulary was accounted for. The study suggests that L1 orthographic differences and similarities (e.g. interword boundary) may affect word identification, thus contributing to morphological processing of Chinese compound words. The study provided empirical evidence to support cross-language influence in morphological processing of a non-alphabetic language.

Orthographic effects on the perception and production of L2 mandarin tones

Recent studies on orthographic effects on L2 phonology have typically investigated alphabetic writing systems and segmental contrasts with novice learners. The current study extends such investigation to compare orthographic effects of an opaque logographic system (Chinese characters) and a transparent schematic system (pinyin) on a suprasegmental feature (lexical tones) with experienced learners. A perception experiment of Mandarin tones by Cantonese L2 learners shows that pinyin was more beneficial for tone perception in monosyllabic words, while tones were better perceived in characters for disyllabic words. A production experiment reveals a similar pattern. Additionally, low performance learners were affected by orthographic differences more than high performance learners. The findings suggest that orthographic effects are not limited to alphabetic systems, and are dependent on task nature and learner proficiency. A transparent system may not always be easier than an opaque system.

W kierunku dwujęzyczności w edukacji wczesnoszkolnej – problemy nauczania czytania w języku obcym na przykładzie języka angielskiego

The article focusses on developing reading by Polish young learners of English as a foreign language. The discussion is conducted within a psycholinguistic componential perspective, which allows for a detailed analysis of various components that constitute the reading skill. Most attention is given to phonological awareness at the decoding stage of reading and its role in beginning reading. First, the author deals with syntactic and orthographic differences between reading in English and reading in Polish. The results of several cross-linguistic studies are presented to illustrate the importance of inter-lingual differences in reading in a foreign language. Then the article reports on the analysis of five coursebooks of English for Polish young learners. The study aimed to investigate how each of the coursebooks develops the reading skill. The analysis looked at the methods of teaching reading, types of reading tasks, the explicitness of phonological instruction, presentation of letter-sound correspondences and the development of other reading-related abilities. The results of the study revealed that the coursebooks differ in the way they teach beginning reading, raising important questions of both didactic and theoretical nature.

Intergenerational Analysis of Patronymic Transformations in the Quebec (Canada) Population Since the Seventeenth Century

Surnames may undergo several transformations over time. Thus, patronymic distributions observed in a population at a given time may hide changes that occurred previously, the extent of which can be estimated with intergenerational data. Using a corpus of 5,100 deep-rooted ascending genealogies from the Quebec (Canada) population, this study compares contemporary surnames with those of founding ancestors in each paternal line and identifies various patronymic mutations occurring over multiple generations. On average, paternal lines go back eight generations. About one-third of all paternal lines presented at least one orthographic difference between the contemporary and the original surnames. Many surnames were transformed several times in a single paternal line, and some changes were different for a given surname along different lines. Most changes occurred among the first generations following that of the founding ancestors. Regional comparisons also show important variations.

A systematic analysis of duplicate records in Scopus

Abstract In recent years, the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus databases have become primary sources for conducting studies that evaluate scientific investigations. Such studies require that duplicate records be excluded to avoid errors of overrepresentation. In this line, we identify duplicate records in Scopus and examine their origins. Identifying journals with duplicate records in Scopus , selecting and downloading bibliographic journal records, and identifying and analyzing the duplicate records is the methodology adopted. Duplicate records are found when articles published in a journal are incorrectly mapped by Scopus to this journal and to a different journal from the same publisher and when there are journal title changes, orthographic differences in the presentation of a journal name, and journal name variants. In these last three cases, one bibliographic record of each duplicate is mapped to Medline coverage of Scopus . Consequently, the identified duplicates and the significant differences in the number of citations received in duplicate articles may influence bibliometric studies. Thus, there is a need for rigorous quality control guidelines to govern database managers and editors to prevent the creation of duplicates.

Modeling Intelligibility of Written Germanic Languages: Do We Need to Distinguish Between Orthographic Stem and Affix Variation?

We measured orthographic differences between five Germanic languages. First, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages does not correlate with orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. We found this hypothesis true when considering the aggregated stem and affix distances between the languages. We also correlated the stem and affix distances within the cognate pairs in each language pair. We found low correlations, the lowest of them being not significant. Second, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages is larger than orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. This hypothesis was also found to be true. Orthographic distance is likely to be a potential predictor of written intelligibility, but our results suggest that when modeling written intelligibility, a distinction needs to be made between stem and affix distances.*

Cross-script phonological priming with Japanese Kanji primes and English targets

Two experiments investigated whether Japanese–English bilinguals have integrated phonological stores for their two languages using a masked phonological priming task with Japanese Kanji (logographic) primes and English targets. In both experiments, lexical decisions for English target words were facilitated by phonologically similar Kanji primes. Furthermore, the size of the phonological priming effect was uninfluenced by the participants' English proficiency or target word frequency, which suggests that the priming effect arose from feedback from sublexical phonological representations to lexical orthographic representations. Because of the orthographic and phonological differences between Japanese and English, these findings provide particularly strong support for the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model's assumption that representations are integrated across languages.

The Linguistic Markers of Persian Heritage Language Speakers: Evidence from the Classroom

This paper provides a preliminary sketch of aspects of Heritage Persian – a language that has not received much attention in the heritage language literature. We base our findings on a novel methodology – surveying student errors in order to build a picture of their heritage language. Exams and other assignments from students enrolled in a Heritage Persian course we analyzed to reveal a variety of morphological, syntactic and orthographic differences between Heritage and Standard Persian. Given that heritage language instructors are confronted with these types of errors on a regular basis, we suggest that this methodology is a useful tool for the initial description of a heritage language, particularly when there is little existing literature. Such a description provides a basis for further research.

THE RECOGNITION OF SPOKEN MONO-MORPHEMIC COMPOUNDS IN CHINESE

This paper explores the auditory lexical access of mono-morphemic compounds in Chinese as a way of understanding the role of orthography in the recognition of spoken words. In traditional Chinese linguistics, a compound is a word written with two or more characters whether or not they are morphemic. A monomorphemic compound may either be a binding word, written with characters that only appear in this one word, or a non-binding word, written with characters that are chosen for their pronunciation but that also appear in other words. Our goal was to determine if this purely orthographic difference affects auditory lexical access by conducting a series of four experiments with materials matched by whole-word frequency, syllable frequency, cross-syllable predictability, cohort size, and acoustic duration, but differing in binding. An auditory lexical decision task (LDT) found an orthographic effect: binding words were recognized more quickly than non-binding words. However, this effect disappeared in an auditory repetition and in a visual LDT with the same materials, implying that the orthographic effect during auditory lexical access was localized to the decision component and involved the influence of cross-character predictability without the activation of orthographic representations. This claim was further confirmed

How Do Typographical Factors Affect Reading Text and Comprehension Performance in Arabic?

The objective of this study was to establish basic reading performance that could lead to useful design recommendations for print display text formats and layouts for the improvement of reading and comprehension performance of print text, such as academic writings, books, and newspapers, of Arabic language. Readability of English print text has been shown to be influenced by a number of typographical variables, including interline spacing, column setting and line length, and so on.Therefore, it is very important to improve the reading efficiency and satisfaction of print text reading and comprehension by following simple design guidelines. Most existing research on readability of print text is oriented to build guidelines for designing English texts rather than Arabic. However, guidelines built for English script cannot be simply applied for Arabic script because of orthographic differences. In the current study, manipulating interline spacing and column setting and line length generated nine text layouts. The reading and comprehension performance of 210 native Arab students assigned randomly to the different text layouts was compared. Results showed that the use of multicolumn setting (with medium or short line length) affected comprehension achievement but not reading and comprehension speed. Participants' comprehension scores were better for the single-column (with long line length) than for the multicolumn setting. However, no effect was found for interline spacing. The recommendations for appropriate print text format and layout in Arabic language based on the results of objective measures facilitating reading and comprehension performance is a single-column (with long line length) layout with no relevance of the interline spacing.