网范文：“Orthography and Identity in Cameroon” 撒哈拉以南非洲提出挑战性问题，英语毕业论文，英语毕业论文，对于设计的新语言系统。标记过多或过少的语气在可用性拼字法方面会有严重的作用。不论过去和现在，拼字法的发展取决于一系列社会语言学问题，其中一些问题是常见的拼写改革，所发生的欧洲语言领域。然而许多撒哈拉以南非洲地区面临的问题是不同的,在一个多民族背景下关心新书写系统的创建，而且带有残余殖民作用。
语言发展项目,至关重要的是依赖于创建或修改文字方案，在这篇范文中,我检查拼字法的历史和政治在喀麦隆、关注语气标记。本文的结论是通过调用现在的正字法律者解释，来更深更广地理解拼写问题。下面的范文进行详述。
Abstract
The tone languages of sub-Saharan Africa raise challenging questions for the design of new writing systems. Marking too much or too little tone can have grave consequences for the usability of an orthography. Orthography development, past and present, rests on a raft of sociolinguistic issues having little to do with the technical phonological concerns that usually preoccupy orthographers. Some of these issues are familiar from the spelling reforms which have taken place in European languages. However, many of the issues faced in sub-Saharan Africa are different, being concerned with the creation of new writing systems in a multi-ethnic context: residual colonial influences, the construction of new nation-states, detribalization versus culture preservation and language reclamation, and so on. Language development projects which crucially rely on creating or revising orthographies may founder if they do not attend to the various layers of identity that are indexed by orthography: whether colonial, national, ethnic, local or individual identity. In this study, I review the history and politics of orthography in Cameroon, with a focus on tone marking. The concludes by calling present-day orthographers to a deeper and broader understanding of orthographic issues.
Introduction
In the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, dozens of writing systems are being created or revised each year. Nowadays the bulk of the effort is focused on minority languages, and there is usually some connection with one or more external agencies (Fishman (1988: 274), Baker (1997: 114)). This is addressed to those linguists who, like the author, have taken it upon themselves to dabble with new writing systems without considering the attendant non-linguistic factors. Just what does it take to devise a completely new orthography, or to diagnose an ailing orthography and prescribe a solution? For some time now, orthography has not enjoyed full status as an academic discipline (Basso, 1974). We can put our question to a range of well-qualified disciplines, and get a range of authoritative answers, all different. In general, though, linguistics – particularly phonology – has occupied a hegemonic position in orthography discussions.
Once the usual scientific rationalizations are dispensed with, we are left with the following: linguistics provides the most expedient trade-off between “empirical” research and “scientific” results. In other words, a small empirical study is presumed to generate robust recommendations for a “scientific orthography.” From a list of 500–1,000 words one can extract sets of minimal pairs, cook up some simple tabulations, and unambiguous findings for the writing system. The other disciplines do not provide such off-the-shelf technology for the orthographer. For example, conducting a series of reading and writing experiments with several candidate orthographies is more time consuming, the analysis is more difficult, and the study often raises more questions than it answers. Similar points can be made in connection with other research methodologies, whether sociolinguistic, or ethnographic, or pedagogical, or developmental, etc (see §9 for a more complete list).
The hardened linguist – according to this crude caricature – does not want to be held up with conclusions that are hedged around with caveats, but just wants to get on with applying the practical method. The solution “handed down” to literacy workers may be somewhat idealized, but they will be able to work out the details as part of implementing a “practical orthography.” Sometimes, things work out pretty much according to plan. Too often, however, the implementation process runs aground, and the reason is often closely tied to identity. Professional linguists point to their “scientific evidence” and get frustrated that the other parties to the decision-making process do not fully appreciate the merit of their research. This may lead in turn to conflict and to entrenched positions. Paradoxically, as selfappointed professional orthographer, the linguist may have to face the possibility that his or her own identity has got in the way. The present reviews the history of orthography in Cameroon, paying special attention to the marking of tone. The relationship between orthography and colonial, national, local and individual identity is explored.
The focus is on writing systems, as distinct from writing itself, which also takes place in a socio-political context (Clark and Ivanic, 1997). This discussion is important whether mother-tongue literacy is viewed ˇ simply as a route to literacy in a national language (Wagner, 1993: 171), or whether it is viewed as independently important in its own right (Hornberger, 1998). And it is important regardless of whether the agent for orthographic change is an individual or an agency, local or national, indigenous or external.2 Since official language policy tends to differ from de facto policy (c.f. Schiffman, 1996), I have endeavored to consider all influences on orthography. Today, orthography development continues apace in sub-Saharan Africa. This is intended as a cautionary tale for those who create or revise orthographies. Fishman aptly sums up my own thesis: A clearer realization of the complexity and conflict that characterize the reallife contexts in which writing systems function should also help make the writing system specialist more aware that cooperation with other social researchers outside the usual linguistic and psychoeducational specializations (e.g., with sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists) is absolutely necessary if the creation and revision of writing systems is to be understood more completely or achieved more humanely in the future than it has been in the past. (Fishman, 1988: 284)
Tone and orthography in Cameroon
Cameroon is situated in the continental hinge between western and southern Africa. The country is linguistically diverse, with languages from three major families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo. Within Niger-Congo, three groups are represented: Adamawa-Ubangian, West-Atlantic and Benue-Congo (which includes the Grassfields and Bantu groups). In all, Cameroon has some 279 languages (Grimes, 2017), spoken by 15 million people (1998 est.), in an area slightly larger than California (about twice the size of the United Kingdom). Figure 1 shows the location of the main groups. Most of Cameroon’s languages are tonal. In a tone language, voice pitch on an individual syllable can differentiate lexical or grammatical meaning. The study of tone is mainly the province of phonology (Pike, 1948; Fromkin, 1978; van der Hulst and Snider, 1993; Odden, 1995). The linguistic function of tone will be illustrated using language data from Dschang [ÙAN], a Bamileke language3 from the Grassfields group, spoken by over 300,000 people in the Western Province of Cameroon.
My first impressions of the tone marking system were gained by talking to local Cameroonians involved in literacy work. They ed that tone marking was difficult to teach, that it put people off writing the language, and that they had to add further diacritics to enable good public readings. Yet people were also quick to how important it was to mark tone, readily reciting lists of minimal pairs, such as those given in (1) above. I discovered cases where a lexical tonal distinction could not be represented in the orthography. For example, the distinction between high and low tone verbs in the simple present continuous tense is only tonal, but it cannot be represented orthographically without introducing a third tone mark. This situation is fully explained in (Bird, 1999c).
The author’s extensive study of the Dschang tone system confirmed Hyman’s finding (Hyman, 1985) that the tonal alternations in this language are postlexical, i.e. part of the process of uttering words in the context of a phrase. In effect, the tone patterns serve to “glue” words together into phrases. (In this respect the system functions like English phrasal intonation, which is not marked orthographically but for the limited use of punctuation symbols such as the comma.) I suspected that the tone marks were not actually helping speakers of the language, for fluent reading aloud, for comprehension, and for writing. Formal experimentation later confirmed this suspicion (Bird, 1999d). In this study, mother-tongue speakers of the Dschang language having a variety of ages and educational backgrounds, and having different levels of exposure to the orthography, were tested on location in the Western Province of Cameroon. All but one had attended classes on tone marking.
Participants read texts which were marked and unmarked for tone, then added tone marks to the unmarked texts. Analysis showed that the current phonemic tone marking system for the Dschang language degrades reading fluency and does not help to resolve tonally ambiguous words. Experienced writers attain an accuracy score of 83.5% in adding tone marks to a text, while inexperienced writers score a mere 53%, which is not much better than chance. The experiment raised serious doubts about the suitability of the phonemic method of marking tone for languages having pervasive phrase-level tone-sandhi effects, and lent support to the notion that a writing system should have “fixed word images.” However, my proposals for changing the tone orthography met a roadblock, despite my work in linguistic analysis, my evaluation of other approaches to tone orthography (Bird, 1999c), and my experimental work. It soon became evident that change would not be brought about through linguistic argumentation but by addressing issues surrounding identity.
In understanding these issues, it is helpful to consider the following questions. First, why did surface tone marking get adopted in Dschang and other languages when it appears to be so inefficient? Second, what role has the Cameroon orthography standard played, and how has this role changed over time? And third, when is any kind of orthographic change warranted and how can change be introduced? The ensuing discussion addresses these questions from the standpoint of the political, social, linguistic and individual identity which orthography both engenders and builds upon.()
网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文作品权归所有；未经官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯作品权现象，保留一切法学追诉权。()
更多范文欢迎访问我们主页 当然有需求可以和我们 联系交流。-X()
|
