Articles
Steven Bird (pp. 131–162)
Orthography and identity in Cameroon
Tonya Stebbins (pp. 163–194)
Emergent spelling patterns in Sm’algyax (Tsimshian, British Columbia)
Sally Johnson & Frank Finlay (pp. 195–214)
(Il)literacy and (im)morality in Bernhard Schlink’s
The reader
Book Reviews
Roy Harris:
Rethinking writing (Florian Coulmas)
Richard Sproat:
A computational theory of writing systems (Gerald Penn)
Jean Bottéro, Clarisse Herrenschmidt & Jean-Pierre Vernant:
Ancestor of the West: Writing, reasoning and religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece (Mary R.
Bachvarova)
Mark Collier & Bill Manley:
How to read Egyptian hieroglyphs: A step-by-step guide to teach yourself (Antonio Loprieno)
Richard Salomon:
Ancient Buddhist scrolls from Gandhāra: The British Library Kharosthī fragments
(Thomas Oberlies)
Juha Janhunen & Volker Rybatzki (eds):
Writing in the Altaic world (Roy Andrew Miller)
Gari K. Ledyard:
The Korean language reform of 1446 (Young-key Kim-Renaud)
Elizabeth Hill Boone:
Stories in red and black: Pictorial histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Martha J. Macri)
Susan A. Phillips:
Wallbangin’: Graffiti and gangs in L.A. (Betsy Rymes)
Linnea C. Ehri & Jamie L. Metsala (eds):
Word recognition in beginning literacy (Dolores Perin)
Gunther Kress:
Early spelling: Between convention and creativity (Mark Sebba)
Raymond M. Klein & Patricia A. McMullen (eds):
Converging methods for understanding reading and dyslexia (Joanne F. Carlisle)
Publications received (pp. 271–272)
Index to Volume Four (pp. 273–276)
Orthography and identity in Cameroon
Steven Bird
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 many 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 — involving residual colonial influences, the construction of new nation-states, detribalization vs. culture preservation and language reclamation. Language development projects which crucially rely on creating or revising orthographies may founder if they do not attend to the various layers of identity (colonial, national, ethnic, local, or individual) that are indexed by orthography. This study reviews the history and politics of orthography in Cameroon, with a focus on tone-marking. The article concludes by calling present- day orthographers to a deeper and broader understanding of orthographic issues.
Emergent spelling patterns in Sm’algyax (Tsimshian, British Columbia)
Tonya Stebbins
Efforts to strengthen endangered languages very often involve vernacular literacy. Although the development of written materials can be of benefit to communities, the process of developing a written standard is frequently long and complex. This paper describes the development of writing in Sm’algyax, a Tsimshianic language of British Columbia, Canada. The practical orthography used to write Sm’algyax has now been in use for over twenty years, but the development of spelling conventions for writing the language is still on-going. Using a critical discourse analysis approach, this paper identifies the many factors that influence the development of the Sm’algyax writing system, and describes their interaction.
(Il)literacy and (im)morality in Bernhard Schlink’s
The reader
Sally Johnson & Frank Finlay
This paper explores the theme of literacy in a recent novel, The reader, by the German author Bernhard Schlink. Drawing both on literary analysis and on the insights of the “new literacy studies”, the paper argues that the depiction of illiteracy contained in the novel is problematical in two main ways. First, there are a number of textual inconsistencies regarding the definition and portrayal of illiteracy. Second, the novel provides a questionable account of the relationship between literacy and an individual’s capacity for moral and aesthetic judgement, especially in the context of debates about the Holocaust. We are therefore skeptical of the way in which The reader has been enthusiastically held up as a realistic account of illiteracy and its potential consequences, not least by Sir Claus Moser in Improving literacy and numeracy: A fresh start (1999), a report on “basic skills” produced for the Department of Education and Employment in the UK.