Language and Linguistics

1
Language and Linguistics

   

• This section of the course is about language ...
  the vehicle for holding and transmitting culture
• We will cover the origins of human language the
  structure of language historical linguistics
  sociolinguistics and the history of writing.

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Language origins

   

• Evidence for the evolution of language comes from
  anatomy comparative anatomy of modern humans
  and chimps and comparative anatomy of hominids
  through time and from primate sign language,
  experiments in tool making, and comparative
  linguistics.
• The capacity for language, like the capacity for
  culture, was part of biological evolution.

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• Evidence for the evolution of language comes from
  anatomy comparative anatomy of modern humans
  and chimps and comparative anatomy of hominids
  through time and from primate sign language,
  experiments in tool making, and comparative
  linguistics.

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• We do not know much about the details of language
  evolution but we do know that the capacity for
  language, like the capacity for culture, was part
  of biological evolution.
• There have not been any hominids on Earth except
  for H. sapiens for 40,000 years. That is probably
  how long it has been since the currently
  observable human capacity for language has been
  part of our repertoire.

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• There are technologically primitive people on
  Earth hunters and gatherers who never took part
  in the Neolithic revolution, much less the
  preindustrial state revolution or the industrial
  revolution or the post-industrial revolution now
  underway.
• But there are no primitive people on Earth. All
  humans have the same capacity for acquiring a
  language and all human languages ever known are
  capable of transmitting any culture, even the
  most technologically complex.

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• The evolution of language and the development of
  the human hand and the ability to make tools are
  probably all related.
• The voice box and neurological complexity have
  all evolved.
• We know from endocranial casts that the area of
  the brain devoted to speech began developing as
  early as H. habilis.

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Speech and handedness

• The speech area of the brain is adjacent to the
  area devoted to the control of the human hand.
• The makers of Oldowan tools were mostly right
  handed.
• Chimps can make stone tools they dont do that
  in the wild but when they do in experiments in
  captivity, they do not show any preference for
  right- or left handedness (Stanley Ambrose,
  Science 2001).
• William Haviland points out that handedness is
  associated with lateralization of the brain, as
  is language.

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Hypoglossal canal

• By half a million years ago, in H. erectus, we
  see a major increase in the size of the
  hypoglossal canal which could accommodate
  larger nerves for controlling the tongue.
• By the time we get to Neandertals, the
  hypoglossal canal is the same size as it is in
  fully modern humans (though this is
  controversial)

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Hyoid bone

• The hyoid bone U-shaped bone at the base of the
  tongue that supports the tongue muscles
• In Neanderthals, the hyoid shows that the larynx
  was as developed as that in modern humans
• And the thorax had expanded to the same size as
  that of modern humans breath control required
  for continual speech.

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Washoe and other chimps

• Experiments with chimps and other apes show they
  are capable of much more than we thought, in
  terms of language.
• Chimps do not have the physical apparatus for
  human speech, but Beatrice and Allan Gardner
  taught Washoe, a female chimp, 160 signs in
  Ameslan.

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Generalizing signs

• Washoe moved beyond the signs and generalized
  them and combined them.
• She learned open for one door, and then used it
  to ask for other doors to be opened
• She asked for refrigerators to be opened and
  pointed to open drawers and briefcases.

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• Washoe and Lucy (who was trained by Roger Fouts)
  learned the sign for feces and generalized it to
  mean dirty.
• Lucy used the term as an expletive when she got
  mad at Fouts for not giving her something.
• Lucy invented cry hurt food three signs in
  Ameslan to talk about radishes and candy
  fruit to talk about watermelons. Chimps and
  other great apes achieve the linguistic capacity
  of a 23 year old human.

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Comparative linguistics and language origins

• Brent Berlin and Paul Kay studied 110 languages
  and found seven stages in the development of
  color terms.
• All languages have at least two terms, white and
  black, or color and lack of color.
• When languages acquire a third term, it is always
  red.
• When languages acquire a fourth term, it is
  either green or yellow.

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Berlin and Kays study

• At five terms, green or yellow enters, depending
  on which one entered at stage IV.
• At 6 terms, blue enters, and at 7 terms, brown
  enters.
• At the final stage of 8 or more terms, purple,
  pink, orange, grey or combinations of these terms
  enter the lexicon. Moreover, color lexicons
  become more complex as societies become more
  complex.

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Brown and Witkowskis study

• Cecil Brown and Stanley Witkowski replicated
  Berlin and Kays work using plants and animals.
• At the first stage of lexical complexity for
  organisms, languages have a word for plant.
• Next they distinguish trees from all other
  plants.
• Then grerb enters the lexicon grass and/or herb.

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• Then bush enters, and then grass, and the vine.
• In the animal kingdom, the simplest lexicons
  distinguish animals from plants.
• Then fish enter the lexicon then bird then
  snake then wug (worm and bug) and finally,
  mammal.

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Complexity of the lexicon

• But complexity of the lexicon for organisms is
  very plastic, as comparisons between urban and
  primitive peoples shows.
• People in small-scale societies can name from
  400-800 plants.
• In urban areas, this is 40-80 and they recognize
  even fewer, as John Gatewood showed in his
  research on loose talk.

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Pidgins and creoles

• Recent studies of Pidgins and Creoles also shed
  light on the evolution of language.
• Pidgin languages are always second languages.
• They develop when speakers of different languages
  try to communicate, often for purposes of trade.
• The lexicon usually comes from one language, and
  the grammar from the other.

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• Creole languages develop from pidgins, but as
  people develop native capacity in a pidgin, the
  structure changes.
• Hawaii is a good case. In the late 19th century,
  Filipinos, Puerto-Ricans, Anglo-Americans,
  Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American Blacks
  all came to work on the plantations there.

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Bickertons study

• Derek Bickerton studied Hawaiian Creole in 1975
  when it was a fully developed language.
• Compared the structural properties of Hawaiian
  Creole to other creoles.
• Found similarity in the use of particles for
  modifying verb roots to produce tense, and
  similarities in the use of singular, plural and
  neutral number markers.

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• Bickerton suggests that the similarities across
  creoles are because of a genetic substrate in
  humans.
• This substrate produces basic structural
  properties in languages at the early stage of
  development.
• Noam Chomsky referred to as the biological basis
  of the capacity for language acquisition.

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Language complexity and evolution

• Some people are studying the properties of child
  languages across the world to test whether this
  is true.
• If it is, then the theory would be that the more
  child-like a language, the easier it is to learn
  and the more like early language it must be.
• But languages are getting simpler English and
  modern German from early German, Spanish, Italian
  and French from Latin.
• So the whole picture is not yet clear.

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Childrens language acquisition

• 12 - 13 months name objects
• 18 20 months one-word sentences
• 18 24 months two-word sentences

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• The experiment at Washington State University on
  language origins.

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Structure of language

• Immediate constituents approach Leonard
  Bloomfield
• Transformational grammar approach Noam Chomsky

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Chomskys observation

• The IC approach doesnt account for the fact that
  humans can learn languages or for the fact that
  languages are generative
• From a finite number of rules operating on a
  finite number of words, we can encode and decode
  an infinite number of well-formed sentences.

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Transformational-generative grammar

• TG grammar makes it possible to understand
  language play
• It makes understandable the fact that sentences
  can have many meanings because they are similar
  surface representations of different roots.
• Flying planes can be dangerous
• I dont like Johns cooking

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Four parts of grammar

• Phonology
• Morphology
• Syntax
• Semantics
• The earliest part that we acquire is the
  phonology and it appears to be the most
  difficult part of a language to acquire after
  childhood

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Writing is not the same as language

• As we look at grammar, the first thing to
  remember is that writing is not the same as
  language.
• Language is an ideal concept, like race, and only
  exists in the surface representations.
• Speech and writing are different surface
  representations of language, and writing is not a
  better representation than speech.

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English phonology

• English has 46 phonemes and many allophones
• We discover the phonemes of a language by looking
  for short, minimal pairs, like pig/big in
  English to isolate distinctive features
• Here we see that voicing is the distinctive
  feature because p and b are both bilabial stops,
  but only one is voiced
• In English, we have stops, fricatives,
  affricates, nasals, and liquids.

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• Stops, or plosives, are made by forming the mouth
  and tongue in a particular way and forcing the
  air to stop temporarily on the way out of the
  mouth during speech.
• The letters p, t, and k represent the three
  common voiceless stops in English.
• The p sound is a bilabial stop
• The t sound is an apico-dental stop
• The k sound is a velar stop

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Voiced stops

• Each voiceless stop has its voiced counterpart in
  English, so be have
• p, t, k and b, d, and g
• Note the meaningful differences between the words
  ten and den, pig and big, cut and gut (curl/girl)
• The difference is the single, distinctive feature
  of voicing

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Allophones

• Many sound differences are not phonemic, but are
  allophones
• Recall the concept of an allele an alternative
  form of a gene
• The t sound has several allophones in English
• Word initial, before a vowel, the t sound is
  heavily aspirated
• Put your hand up to your mouth and say torrid
  tango

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• Say itty bitty the t in the middle of each
  word has no aspiration. Word medially and
  intervocalically, the t sound is unaspirated.
• Native speakers of English find it hard to make a
  word-initial, prevocalic, unaspirated t like
  the t in patter.
• Native speakers of Spanish use this sound
  incorrectly, word initially and prevocalically,
  in English Spanish simply has no aspirated t.

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Affricates

• The word saturate has an affricate in it for
  many dialects of American English
• An affricate is a combination of a stop and a
  fricative, a t and a sh, in this case
• One of the allophones of t is ch when followed
  by the glide sound y and the vowel sound u as
  in satch-yur-ate
• Some people say matoor, leaving out the the glide
  before the u, and thus converting the phoneme t
  to its prevocalic aspirated allophone

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Dialect allophones

• British dialects of English dont have the ch
  allophone for t at all
• They say matyoor, separating the glide and the u
  vowel and adopting the prevocalic aspirated
  allophone for t

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English phonology

• The phonology of the grammar comprises the rules
  for the sounds of the language which sounds can
  be made, and how the sounds can occur in various
  positions in words.
• We have 46 phonemes in American English,
  including 11 vowels in most dialects of American
  English.
• Sleek hawk high-front to low-back vowels

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The ten vowels of English

• i see o sew
• v sit U put
• e set u ooze
• æ cat b sofa
• a hot
• saw

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• Many Americans have nine, rather than ten vowels.
• cot and caught
• marry, merry, Mary
• There are only six squiggles to represent the ten
  vowels, plus four diphthongs
• say, toy, cow, my

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The Kissinger effect

• Why take you through these details of phonology?
  To show you how much you have to learn in order
  to become a native speaker of a language.
• No one has a better vocabulary or a better
  command of the syntax and the semantics of
  English than Henry Kissinger does.
• But Kissinger came to the U.S. when he was 15
  years old, by which time, his phonology was
  locked into German.

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Morphology

• Morphology comprises the rules of the grammar for
  constructing meaningful chunks of sounds.
• A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a
  language.
• Bound and unbound morphemes.
• -un is a bound morpheme with many allomorphs
  illegal, immaterial, inactive, ignoble

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Past tense and plural nouns in English

• Plural s z ez
• Past t d ed
• Note that the e in ez and in ed is a shwa ?
• part parts, bag bags, rose roses
• slip slipped, bag bagged, want wanted

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Sociolinguistics

• Language and gender
• The use of honorifics and hedging in speech
• Some language, like Japanese, have quite strong
  rules about how men and women should speak.

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Gendered speech in Japanese

• yamada ga musuko to syokuzi o tanosinda
• yamada      son      dinner      enjoyed
• yamada-san ga musuko-san to o-syokuzi o
  tanosim-are-ta
• yamada-hon      son-hon      hon-dinner   
  enjoyed-hon
• Both sentences mean "Yamada enjoyed dinner with
  his son."
• Bonvillain, Nancy. 2000. Language, culture, and
  communication the meaning of messages. 3rd ed.
  Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice Hall, 2000.

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• Women in the U.S. use question mode for
  declarative statements as part of a softening, or
  hedging speech register.
• Men also use softening modes, but in different
  situations.
• It remains to be seen whether the amount of
  softening differs between men and women.

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Sociolinguistics dialects

• Social status marked by language
• Labovs study of the fourth floor r at Kleins
  (20), Macys (51) and Saks Fifth Avenue (62)
• Code switching and dialects
• Ebonics is a dialect of English

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis language and thought

• We know that we can say things in one language
  that we cant in another.
• But we also know that translation is possible.
• Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf,
  articulated the idea that we think the way we
  think because of our language.

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• For example, there are two verbs for to be in
  Spanish, depending on whether a phenomenon is
  transitory or permanent.
• There are two verb forms in Turkish, depending on
  whether one knows the action or knows about the
  action.
• Verbs in Navajo are marked for the shape of the
  object spoken about.
• SVO (English), SOV (Japanese), VSO (Welsh)

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• Spanish and German require that the speaker
  categorize everyone as familiar or not. What does
  all this do to our everyday thinking?
• Sapir said that Human beings...are very much at
  the mercy of the particular language which has
  become the medium of expression for their
  society (1929)
• This is the strong form of linguistic
  determinism, which is not accepted.

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• Note the weak form of linguistic relativity
  Variations in language structure do structure
  thought, but we do not know how much.
• Note the difference in the meaning of the
  following verb forms worked, has worked, once
  worked, used to work, had worked
• In Israel, the U.S., and Finland, children
  incorporate gender roles at different ages. The
  languages of these countries have correspondingly
  different levels of gender labeling.

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Historical linguistics

• Glottochronology is based on the idea that the
  core vocabulary of languages is changes at a
  constant rate about 14 per 1000 years.
• Morris Swadesh showed that this was more-or-less
  the case for many written languages.
• The claim is that, with caution, we can use this
  to examine the evolution of nonwritten languages.

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Lexicostatistics

• Based on the systematic comparison of cognates
  across languages to determine the times since two
  languages separated from a common ancestor.

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• We use these principles to reconstruct languages
  that do not have writing
• Fox Cree Menomeni Ojibwa
• pematesiwa pematesiw pematesew
  pimatisi
• niyawi niyaw neyaw niyaw
• posiwa posiw posew pisi
• he lives, my body, he embarks

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1066 and all that

• beef cattle
• pork pig
• mutton sheep
• venison deer
• chicken chicken
• dine, cogitate, endeavor, acquire, read, thing,
  build, want, sad, big,
• defecate, copulate, urinate, expectorate
• garbage and target

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When did we get these words?

• village
• garage
• collage

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Indo-European languages

• Indo-Iranian
• Italic
• Germanic
• Celtic
• Baltic
• Slavic
• Albanian
• Greek language
• Armenian language
• Thracian
• Dacian
• Phrygian
• Anatolian
• Tocharian

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Germanic

• German, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, English,
  Norwegian, Danish, Swedish
• German Bavarian, Swabian, Alsatian, Cimbrian,
  Rimella, Reinfrankisch, Pennsylvania,
  Luxembourgeois, Swiss German, Yiddish

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Italic

• Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Ladino, Asturian,
  Aragonese, Catalan, Valencian, French, Wallon,
  Jerais, Poitevain, Piccard, Occitan, Lengadocian,
  Gascon, Auvergnat, Limosin, Franco-Provencal,
  Rumantsch, Sursilvan, Fiulian, Ladin, Italian
  (and all its variants), Rumanian, Sardinian,

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• Note, however, that 150m people speak Russian as
  a second language.
• French and English are spoken as second languages
  by 50-75m people each.
• Malay-Indonesian, French, Urdu, Punjabi, Korean,
  Telegu, Tamil, Marathi, Italian, Cantonese round
  out the top 20 and are spoken by at least 25m
  each.

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The vanishing languages

• 5 of the worlds languages are spoken by 95 of
  the worlds people
• 95 of the worlds languages are spoken by 5 of
  the worlds people

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A few facts about vanishing languages

• Of 220 Indian languages still spoken in Mexico,
  17 are nearing extinction.
• Of the 168 American Indian languages listed for
  the United States, 71 are extinct or soon will
  be.
• Breton probably had 1.4m speakers in 1900. It is
  now down to perhaps 400k speakers.

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The case of Navaho

• Navajo was down to fewer than 5000 speakers in
  the 19th century. It made a dramatic comeback and
  had over 100,000 speakers in the 1970s.
• Now, it too, may be headed for extinction, even
  though it is said to have over 150k speakers.

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Whats the problem?

• One could argue that language die-off is just
  part of natural evolution
• The language of Cesar is not spoken today, and
  the language is Jesus is spoken by a few hundred
  speakers.
• Nothing catastrophic seems to have happened . . .
  Why worry now?

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Language diversity and survival

• Language diversity did not cause the evolutionary
  success of Homo sapiens.
• Some fraction of human knowledge however, is
  stored in the languages remaining today
• Whatever that fraction is, can we afford to lose
  it?

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The language disappearance experiment

• I wouldnt be so worried about the mass
  extinction of languages if I had 20 or 30 planets
  on which to conduct this experiment
• We do not know if its enough to rescue knowledge
  rather than languages

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Whats being done?

• Anthropologists and linguists who are concerned
  about language preservation are helping to
  preserve and to vitalize languages.

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Writing

• Writing was invented at least twice, perhaps
  three or four times
• Spread through trade, proselytizing, and
  schooling
• First Middle East 3200 BCE (Uruk, S. Iraq)
• Indus Valley 2500 BCE
• Olmecs 600 BCE (up to 15 different writing
  systems in ancient Mexico)

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Writing

• Early scripts of the Middle East evolved into
  syllabaries and alphabets, or phonographic
  systems
• The system invented in China during the Shang
  period (1750-1040 BCE) was logographic-syllabic
• This system evolved into the characters used, in
  various forms, for writing Chinese, Japanese,
  Korean, and Vietnamese.

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• First writing system, cuneiform, was
  logographic-syllabic late fourth millennium BCE
  in what is today Iraq.
• Developed to write Sumerian, and was later
  adapted by the Akkadians, a Semitic population,
  to write their own, entirely different language.
• By 1100 BCE, speakers of Semitic languages
  (Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic) had developed a
  script that contained symbols representing
  consonants. Modern Arabic and Hebrew scripts are
  both derived from the early Semitic.

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Hebrew and Arabic

• Jews have been an isolated ethnic-religious group
  within multiethnic states and have adapted Hebrew
  to write the national languages they spoke.
• Yiddish (derived primarily from German),
  Judeo-Arabic (spoken by Jews across the
  Arabic-speaking world), Judeo-Spanish (based on
  Spanish before 1492 when the Jews were expelled
  from Spain) and Judeo-Tat (20,000 Jews today in
  Russia and Azerbaijan)

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• Arabic is among the most widely used alphabetic
  scripts Arabic, the Berber languages, Pashto,
  Farsi, Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi
• 1300-1928 CE, Arabic used for writing Turkish
• Arabic becoming alternative to Cyrillic for
  writing Turkic and Iranian languages of the
  former Soviet Union
• One form of Arabic, Maltese, is written with a
  Roman script, the consequence of Christian
  influence.

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• Persian (Farsi) is written today in Arabic
  script.
• Ancient Persian written with a Semitic (Aramaic)
  script beginning in the second millennium BCE,
  and Persians brought their script to Altaic
  peoples (Turks, Mongols) during the 6th-8th
  centuries CE.

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The Alphabet

• Around 750 BCE, the Greeks adapted one variety of
  the Semitic script (probably Phoenician), adding
  some symbols for vowels and consonants that were
  needed for writing Greek.
• This innovation produced the alphabet, a writing
  system on which many modern scripts are based.
• Some of the earliest Greek texts were written
  right to left and boustrophendon.
• Writing left to right was established around 500
  BCE

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• The ancient Greek script adapted by Phrygian,
  Lycian, Lydian, Coptic, and Etruscan
• Etruscan alphabet adapted by the Romans, and may
  have stimulated the Germanic and Scandinavian
  runes in the first century CE.
• Germanic runic script brought by the Anglo-Saxons
  to England, around the fifth century CE.

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• Bishop Wulfila translated the Greek Bible into
  Gothic during the fourth century CE, devising
  early Gothic script from Greek characters.
• The Armenian alphabet was developed early in the
  fifth century CE by Bishop Mesrop Mashtots (St.
  Mesrop) to make it easier for people to read the
  liturgy.
• Ninth century, St. Cyril (hence the term Cyrillic
  alphabet) and his brother St. Methodius
  translated the Bible into Slavonic, adapting the
  Greek alphabet and adding some characters as
  needed.

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• Cyrillic-based scripts now used for writing
  Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Serbian
• Cyrillic adapted to writing gt50 non-Slavic
  languages Moldovan, Tajik, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar,
  Azeri, Kirghiz, and Abkhaz, as well as Chuckchee
  and other tribal languages of the Russian Far
  East.

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• At around the same time that Cyrillic was
  developed, a separate adaptation of the Greek
  alphabet, called Glagolitic, was used for writing
  the Roman Catholic liturgy in Slavic-speaking
  areas.
• This was eventually replaced by a version of the
  Roman alphabet. Today, Serbians and Croatians in
  the former Yugoslavia speak the same language but
  Serbians, being mostly Orthodox, use Cyrillic
  script, while Croatians, being mostly Catholic,
  use a Roman script.

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• The Roman alphabet was adapted to the writing of
  many modern European languages (French, German,
  English, Welsh, Lithuanian, Polish, Estonian,
  Hungarian, Basque, among others).
• Also adapted for writing Chinese (Pinyin),
  Japanese (Romaji), Vietnamese (Quoc Ngu), and
  hundreds of so-called preliterate, indigenous
  languages in Africa, Indonesia, New Guinea, North
  and South America, Australia, and the Pacific.

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Preliterate was once us

• Popular literacy was made possible only in the
  15th century with Gutenbergs invention
• When St. Augustine arrived in England in 597 CE,
  a few Anglo-Saxons might have been able to write
  in Germanic runic script.
• It would be another hundred years before Old
  English would be written with a variant of Roman
  script.
• In the 6th century, Old English was a
  "preliterate, indigenous" language.

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Brahmi script

• South Asian scripts derived from Brahmi, fifth
  century BCE.
• The Brahmi-derived scripts include Devanagari,
  used for writing Hindi.
• Varieties of the Brahmi script are used for
  writing Khmer, Tibetan, Thai, and Sinhalese
• As Arabic script followed the spread of Islam,
  the Brahmi script followed the spread of
  Buddhism.

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Logographic scripts

• By the third century BCE Chinese was being
  standardized and dictionaries were compiled in
  the first century CE.
• Modern Mandarin Chinese dictionaries show more
  than 60,000 characters, but 2400 characters
  account for 99 of all characters in modern
  Chinese texts.
• Koreans adopted Chinese characters in the fifth
  century CE.

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The Korean case

• Hangul introduced by King Seycong in 1444 CE to
  make it easier for people to become literate.
• In 1949, North Korea abolished the use of Chinese
  characters in public writing, again to extend
  literacy.
• South Korean newspapers still use Chinese
  characters and schoolchildren learn nearly 2000
  characters before graduating from high school

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The Japanese case

• The Japanese case the rate of literacy does not
  depend on the nature of the writing system, but
  on long-term schooling.
• Japanese adopted Kanji, in third or fourth
  century CE, probably via Korea.
• By 608 CE, Prince ShÇtoku began sending students
  to China, and they brought back many Chinese
  texts. Much Chinese culture (music and food, in
  addition to writing) was adopted in Japan,
  particularly by the elite, during the 7th and 8th
  centuries.

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Syllabaries and logographs

• Two syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana, were
  developed in the 9th century.
• Katakana evolved from auxiliary marks used by
  Buddhist monks who were reading Chinese texts and
  is used in conjunction with Kanji.
• Hiragana is used entirely on its own, developed
  primarily as a women's script, just as Hangul in
  Korea was initially rejected by the elite and
  became a vehicle for literary expression among
  some people who would otherwise have remained
  illiterate.

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Phonographic and idiographic scripts

• The Japanese were introduced to Roman script in
  the late 16th century by European missionaries.
• During the American occupation, 1945-1952, the
  U.S. Education Mission to Japan pushed Romaji in
  the belief that Kanji could only be understood by
  a privileged, class, but after the occupation it
  was rejected.
• Japanese students today learn about 2000
  characters, the two Kana syllabaries, and
  Romaji.

94
The Vietnamese case

• The Vietnamese case clear that literacy is more
  easily accomplished with romanized scripts than
  with Chinese characters under some conditions.
• The Chinese colonial period in Vietnam was a
  millenium 111 BCE - 939 CE.
• The Chinese did not actively introduce their
  writing system to Vietnam, but Buddhist and
  Confucian clergy used Chinese characters to write
  Sino-Vietnamese

95

• Character-based writing system for Vietnamese,
  called Chu Nom, was established among the elite
  by the 14th century.
• In 1651, a French Jesuit, Alexandre de Rhodes,
  produced a Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary
  and a catechism in Vietnamese, all in a special
  Roman-based, called Quoc Ngu, that he devised.
• It was favored during French rule (1861-1945),
  because it was easier for administrators to learn
  than classical Chinese or Chu Nom. For precisely
  this reason, the Chu Nom system was used for
  anticolonial resistance literature during the
  French colonial period.

96

• By the end of World War I, some nationalist
  leaders advocated adopting Quoc Ngu for mass
  literacy.
• In 1939, less than 20 of the population was
  literate. In 1945, with the declaration of
  independence against the French, Ho Chi Minh
  launched a campaign of mass literacy explicitly
  to enlist people in the struggle against the
  colonials.

97

• The Vietnamese first got writing from contact
  with their Chinese occupiers.
• Chu Nom was an intermediate attempt to modify the
  writing system to Vietnamese realities.
• The arrival of European missionaries brought a
  Latin-based script which, 200 years later, was
  used as an instrument of colonial control.
• Then, a century after that, the same script
  became an instrument for overthrowing the
  colonial regime.

98
Indigenous scripts

• Cherokee (Sequoya, 1820) a case of stimulus
  diffusion
• Bamun (Cameroon)
• Vai (Liberia)