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PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/29876 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2016-01-28 and may be subject to change. CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION...................................................................... 1 1.1 AIM OF THIS STUDY...................................................................................... 2 1.2 RELEVANCE ................................................................................................. 4 1.3 METHOD AND SCOPE.................................................................................... 5 1.4 FORMALISM AND NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS............................................. 6 1.5 ORGANIZATION OF THIS THESIS.................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 2 THE SPELLING OF NATIVE WORDS ................................. 9 2.1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 9 2.2 DUTCH PHONEMES, GRAPHEMES AND THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THEM .......................................................................................... 9 2.2.1 Dutch phonemes .................................................................................. 9 2.2.2 Dutch graphemes............................................................................... 12 2.2.3 Sound-letter correspondences ........................................................... 14 2.3 LITERATURE ON PHONEME-GRAPHEME CORRESPONDENCES ...................... 16 2.3.1 Prescriptive accounts......................................................................... 16 2.3.2 Descriptive accounts.......................................................................... 23 2.4 A NEW MODEL FOR THE RELATION OF SOUNDS AND SPELLING ................... 28 2.5 CONDITIONED AND COMPETING SPELLING VARIANTS................................. 34 2.6 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 41 CHAPTER 3 THE UNIFORM SPELLING OF MORPHEMES................ 43 3.1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... 43 3.2 PREVIOUS ACCOUNTS FOR THE UNIFORM SPELLING OF MORPHEMES .......... 46 3.3 INTRODUCING A NEW ACCOUNT ................................................................. 50 3.4 ACCOUNTING FOR THE VARIATION IN THE SPELLING OF MORPHEMES ........ 53 3.4.1 Variation as the result of autonomous spelling rules ........................ 54 3.4.2 Variation because of variation in lexical representations................. 58 3.4.3 Remaining alternations...................................................................... 62 3.5 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................ 64 2 ANNEKE M. NUNN CHAPTER 4 THE SPELLING OF LOAN WORDS ................................... 67 4.1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... 67 4.2 LITERATURE ON THE SPELLING OF LOAN WORDS........................................ 69 4.2.1 Prescriptive accounts......................................................................... 69 4.2.2 Advisory reports on spelling reform .................................................. 72 4.2.3 Descriptive accounts.......................................................................... 73 4.3 DISTINGUISHING INDIGENOUS WORDS FROM LOAN WORDS ........................ 74 4.4 PHONEME-TO-GRAPHEME CONVERSION RULES FOR NON-NATIVE WORDS .. 78 4.4.1 Spelling rules that capture non-native patterns................................. 80 4.4.2 Other generalizations ........................................................................ 88 4.5 THE SPELLING OF COMPLEX NON-NATIVE WORDS ...................................... 92 4.6 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 95 CHAPTER 5 AUTONOMOUS SPELLING RULES................................... 97 5.1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... 97 5.2 WHY VOWEL DEGEMINATION AND CONSONANT DOUBLING ..................... 99 5.3 DEGEMINATION OF HETEROSYLLABIC CONSONANTS AND <S>................. 102 5.4 HYPHENATION ......................................................................................... 104 5.5 PLACEMENT OF DIACRITICS...................................................................... 108 5.5.1 Diaeresis placement......................................................................... 108 5.5.2 Apostrophe placement ..................................................................... 111 5.6 REMAINING ALTERNATIONS..................................................................... 113 5.6.1 Alternation of <i> and <ie> ........................................................... 113 5.6.2 Vowel Doubling ............................................................................... 114 5.6.3 Orthographic Diminutive Allomorphy............................................. 115 5.6.4 Alternation of <ng> and <n> ......................................................... 116 5.7 ORTHOGRAPHIC SYLLABIFICATION.......................................................... 116 5.8 NON-NATIVE WORDS AND AUTONOMOUS SPELLING RULES ...................... 119 5.9 MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE PROPERTIES OF THE TWO TYPES OF SPELLING RULES123 5.10 CONCLUDING REMARKS ........................................................................ 126 CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH........................................................................... 129 6.1 CONCLUSIONS.......................................................................................... 129 6.1.1 The optimal organization of spelling rules...................................... 129 6.1.2 Orthographic Principles.................................................................. 134 6.1.3 The optimal transcription of lexical sound representations? .......... 136 6.1.4 Relevance for alphabetic spelling systems in general ..................... 137 6.2 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH................................................... 138 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................... 141 DUTCH ORTHOGRAPHY 3 APPENDICES ............................................................................................... 150 A: THE LEXICON AND IMPLEMENTATION OF RULES .................. 150 B: CLASSIFICATION CRITERIA FOR NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE WORDS .......................................... 155 C: PHONEME-TO-GRAPHEME CONVERSION RULES FOR NATIVE WORDS .............................................................................. 164 D: PHONEME-TO-GRAPHEME CONVERSION RULES FOR NON-NATIVE WORDS.................................................... 170 E: OVERVIEW OF AUTONOMOUS SPELLING RULES .................... 182 F: SINGLE OR DOUBLE CONSONANT LETTERS.............................. 187 G: UNIFORM SPELLING OF MORPHEMES AS THE EFFECT OF SPELLING CONVENTIONS........................................... 201 H: OVERVIEW OF SPELLING CHANGES SINCE 1804....................... 209 SAMENVATTING ......................................................................................... 217 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................... 224 CURRICULUM VITAE ................................................................................ 225 Chapter 1 Introduction If writing has so much influence on language, if it can promote or delay the reception of thoughts, then the way one writes deserves to be the object of serious consideration.1 Te Winkel (1863:8) Speech is a wonderful means of communication, but it is not permanent. For this reason, visual ways to preserve speech have been developed for many languages and adopted and adapted by others. Some of these visual systems consist of icons of the concept referred to that are directly interpretable. Other systems use symbols which do not directly refer to meaning, but to the language that refers to that concept. Writing then consists of symbols which refer to linguistic entities like words, morphemes, syllables or sounds, see for instance Gelb (1963). In alphabetic systems, spelling represents sounds, and it does so in a linear and sequential fashion. This is a very efficient way of encoding language. A small number of letters suffice to encode all words. Learning to read and to write a language with a perfect alphabetic spelling system equals learning the regular correspondences between letters and sounds. However, most spelling systems are not of this ideal type. Deviations from one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters can be caused by the fact that there simply are not enough letters to uniquely represent each sound or by the fact that some spelling rules maintain a visible relation between an original word and its derived forms although they are pronounced differently. Other causes of sound-letter mismatches are changes in pronunciation in the course of time that are not reflected orthographically or the influx of loan words that are written according to the spelling of the language of origin. When the number of irregular words becomes too large, spelling can no longer be seen as a code for the pronunciation, but becomes an arbitrary code for words. 1 “Indien