Berry, Jack 1968

Berry, Jack . 1958. "The making of alphabets." In Fishman 1968. Presented as a paper at the Proceedings of the 8th International Congress of Linguistics. Interest level: specialist.

Discusses considerations for orthography development. Scientific principles for characteristics of a good alphabet:

• Linguistic: represents language economically, consistently; avoids phonemic ambiguity
• Pedagogical: economical in relation to time and labor in learning to read and write
• Psychological: respects psychological and physiological processes of reading and writing
• Typographical: suited to modern techniques of writing, such as typewriters and printing

Considers social factors:

• Attitudes of people toward language
• Status of language: national, mother tongue, second language, and degree of bilingualism
• Relationship with other orthographies used in the region
• Dialects: most understandable and greatest number of speakers, a prestige dialect, or compromise

Discusses choice of symbols:

• Extra letters to Roman alphabet
• Special characters
• Digraphs
• Diacritics
• Issues of simplicity in handwriting and printing

Includes arguments for and against most solutions.

• Bibliography module: Berry, Jack 1968
• In overview module: Bibliography (Literacy): B
• In modular book: Bibliography (Literacy), by Doris Gallemore, Trudi C. Hunt, Jeanne Swanson, and Stephen L. Walter
• In document collection: Reference materials
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 28 June 1999

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