Cet article se propose d’étudier la manière dont la traduction reflète le rapport à l’identité culturelle et nationale, et à l’altérité, en prenant pour exemples les systèmes littéraires français et bulgares, à partir de la création de l’alphabet glagolitique par Constantin-Cyrille le Philosophe vers 862 et du Serment de Strasbourg de 842, jusqu’au XIXe siècle, en passant par la Renaissance, d’une part, et le Réveil national bulgare, d’autre part. Les discours des traducteurs français et bulgares servent ici de (...) révélateur des représentations qu’ils ont du statut de leur propre langue ou culture, mais aussi de celles à partir desquelles ils traduisent, ainsi que de leur manière d’appréhender « soi » et « les autres ». Un tel parcours met au jour la nécessité pour l’Europe multiculturelle de se doter d’une histoire de la traduction, afin de mieux comprendre les enjeux de la traduction à l’heure de la mondialisation.This article looks into the effects of translation on consciousness of cultural and national identity and otherness. As examples, we use the French and Bulgarian literary systems from the time of the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet by Constantine-Cyril “the Philosopher” around 862 and the “Oath of Strasbourg” pledged in 842, and up to the 19th century, including the Renaissance on the one hand and the Bulgarian National Awakening on the other. The discourses of French and Bulgarian translators are used as material revealing their representations of the status of their own language and culture, and of those they translated from, and the different ways of apprehending “self” and “others”. What transpires from this study is a need for Europe as a multicultural area to write its own history of translation, as a way of achieving a better understanding of translation as an issue in the context of globalisation. (shrink)

The alphabet effect that showed that codified law, alphabetic writing, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic are interlinked, first proposed by McLuhan and Logan, is revisited. Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s insight that alphabetic writing led to the separation of figure and ground and their interplay, as well as the emergence of visual space, are reviewed and shown to be two additional effects of the alphabet. We then identify more additional new components of the alphabet effect by demonstrating (...) that alphabetic writing also gave rise to Duality, and reductionism or the linear sequential relationship of causes followed by effects. We then review McLuhan’s claim that electrically configured information reversed the dominance of visual space over acoustic space and led to the reversals of cause and effect, and figure and ground. We then demonstrate that General System Theory first formulated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, which also includes chaos theory, complexity theory and emergence and Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of umwelt also entail the reversal of many aspects of the alphabet effect such as the reversals of cause and effect, and figure and ground. (shrink)

As children in elementary school we were taught to recite the alphabet in order: “Aay, Bee, See, Dee, Eii, Eff, Ghee, Aaych, …, Why and Zee”. There is nothing natural about this particular ordering: it is strictly a matter of convention. (When and where it was settled upon I haven’t the remotest notion.) Then, having mastered the ordering, we were taught to apply that knowledge to alphabetize lists of words. The procedure is surprisingly complex, and its mastery by mere (...) eight-year olds attests to the elevated intellectual capacities of human beings. One merely has to try to write down the procedure in a flow chart to see how complex it truly is. In any event, most of us probably emerged from the exercise of learning to use a dictionary believing that we knew all there is to know about alphabetizing. If only that were all there is to it. The trouble is that our third-grade teachers had not reckoned on our having to program computers to alphabetize.. (shrink)

En este artículo damos cuenta de las propuestas de grafemarios -más conocidas y diferenciadas entre sí- para escribir la lengua mapuche y discutimos sus fundamentos y las tensiones que subyacen en ellas. Con ello esperamos contribuir a abrir la actual discusión para una toma de conciencia de las alternativas posibles, de las representaciones que se encuentran en disputa y de lo que generan estas concreciones cuando se llevan al plano de la educación intercultural. La aparición de grafemarios mapuche huilliches y (...) la defensa de unos y resistencia a otros muestra que incluso en aquellas zonas aparentemente más “objetivas y técnicas” de la lengua lo político tiene lugar, evidenciando que lo lingüístico está irrenunciablemente atado a las relaciones de poder que involucran a los sujetos y a las comunidades de habla. In this paper, we discuss some of the different and best known grapheme alphabet proposals for writing the Mapuche language, and discuss their rationale and the tensions that underlie them. With this, we hope to contribute to open the current debate to a new awareness of possible alternatives about the representations that are in dispute and about what these concretions generate when they are used in intercultural education. The appearance of Mapuche Huilliche grapheme alphabets, the adoption of some of them and the resistance to others show that even in language areas seemingly more “objective and technical”, politics takes place. This shows that linguistics is undeniably tied to power relations involving individuals and speech communities. (shrink)

All students of Greek epigraphy are familiar with the abecedarium discovered in 1805, ‘prope Bastam ruri quodam dicto Melliche,’ by Luigi Cepolla, amongst whose papers Mommsen found and published it in his Unteritalische Dialekte . Cepolla's copy, though inaccurate, is not so bad, as I hope to show, as has usually been supposed. To be sure, he proposed to interpret an alphabet as a complete inscription, and actually ‘translated’ it! Nor, I think, could it be properly deciphered until more (...) Messapic inscriptions than were known to Mommsen had been collected and their alphabet more closely studied. It has, however, long been recognized that the Vaste alphabet should be rightly regarded as essentially a Messapic alphabet, although, as is well known, the alphabet of the Messapic inscriptions agrees in the main with the Tarentine-Ionic variety of the Western Greek alphabet; but the proposed explanations of Cepolla's transcript of the Vaste alphabet have been most diverse, not to say perverse—certainly they have been largely arbitrary. They may be sought in the places cited in the footnote below. (shrink)

This chapter considers the possible origins of the associations reported by synaesthetes, especially coloured graphemes. There are two well-documented cases where the origins of coloured letters or numbers are known; one from coloured fridge magnets, one from a jigsaw puzzle. While some synaesthetes report beliefs about the origin of their colours, most would say they have been the same as long as they can remember. Statistical analysis of large groups of synaesthetes indicates more consistency of colours than would be expected (...) by chance: 'A' is often red, 'D' is often brown, while 'I' and 'O' are typically white or black. A systematic study could find no evidence for a common origin, such as alphabet teaching books, for these colours. However, when required to suggest a colour for 'A', non-synaesthetes also tend to choose red. Overall, common synaesthetic colours and those chosen by non-synaesthetes agree more than would be expected by chance. This agreement might be mediated by a relationship between the frequency of occurrence of letters and the frequency of colour names; there is also a relationship between numbers and luminance, such that lower numbers tend to be brighter than later ones. Studies of pre-lingual toddlers have shown they tend to associate angular shapes, such as 'X' and 'Z', with black, and non-angular ones, such as 'I' and 'O', with white. There is also evidence that letters that are learned early are associated with simpler colour concepts. (shrink)

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Carl von Linné, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Christian Wilhelm Büttner attempted to realize the old idea of deciphering the alphabet of the world, which Francis Bacon had raised as a general postulate of science. This article describes these attempts and their interrelations. Linné used the model of the alphabet to classify plants according to the characters of this fruiting body. Gatterer, one of the leading German historians during the Enlightenment, adopted the (...) botanical method of classification by genus and species to classify the history of scripts. He used the forms of the alphabetic characters to measure the age of manuscripts and to map the process of history as a genealogy of culture. Gatterer collaborated closely with Büttner, the first Göttingen professor of natural history. Büttner constructed a general alphabet of languages which connected the phonetics of language with the historically known alphabets. Early on, diplomatics and ethnography combined the natural order of natural history and the cultural order of the alphabet with the attempt to register development and to document development by the evolution of forms. Based on the shared model of the alphabet and on the common necessity to classify their empirical material, natural history and the description of culture were related attempts in the middle of the eighteenth century to comprehend the alphabetically organized nature and a naturally ordered culture. (shrink)

Current research suggests that conceptual in?uences are primarily responsible for inducing synaesthesia, since numerous synaesthetic variants are triggered by linguistic symbols. These linguistic synaesthesias are the focus of the present review article. This article examines the literature on the transfer of synaesthetic colour-associations across languages and shows the scope of the linguistic mechanisms that are implicated. We review known evidence about the interaction between grapheme-colour synaesthesia and the acquisition of a second language, and specifically, we discuss cases of cross-linguistic transfer (...) in which a second language is learned later in life. Research on bilingual subjects has uncovered distinct representations in the brain for a mother tongue and for a later-acquired foreign language. Consequently, these differences have implications for synaesthesia associated with the writing systems of these different languages. By reviewing several individual cases of bilingual synaesthetes, we conclude that synaesthesia might have different types of influences on the acquisition of a second language, ranging from effects that support this learning to those that disturb it. (shrink)

Water is the chemical matrix required for life, the molecular chain that connects all organisms on the planet. But in the twenty-first century, water may replace oil as the most prized of resources. Just as gas-guzzling SUVs use more than their share of fuel, water-guzzling regions threaten the water supply for the rest of the world. In Water, writers, scientists, architects, and artists consider the many aspects of water, at levels from the microscopic to the global, touching on subjects that (...) range from new water infrastructures to ancient bathing rituals. Water includes a chemist's accounting of the true cost of water; photographs taken inside a city's secret waterways; an urban planner's description of how Toronto, New York, Hamburg, and Seoul have redesigned and rethought their waterfront areas; a conceptual artist's series of water bottles "branded" with various modern credos; photographs of a water-damaged ledger from the 1905 Yukon gold rush; two architects' rethinking of how to collect, divert, and transport water from water-rich to water-poor regions; a philosopher's invocation of the spiritual lessons of water; and photographs of a disturbingly beautiful flooded landscape. (shrink)

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Carl von Linné, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Christian Wilhelm Büttner attempted to realize the old idea of deciphering the alphabet of the world, which Francis Bacon had raised as a general postulate of science. This article describes these attempts and their interrelations. Linné used the model of the alphabet to classify plants according to the characters of this fruiting body. Gatterer, one of the leading German historians during the Enlightenment, adopted the (...) botanical method of classification by genus and species to classify the history of scripts. He used the forms of the alphabetic characters to measure the age of manuscripts and to map the process of history as a genealogy of culture. Gatterer collaborated closely with Büttner, the first Göttingen professor of natural history. Büttner constructed a general alphabet of languages which connected the phonetics of language with the historically known alphabets. Early on, diplomatics and ethnography combined the natural order of natural history and the cultural order of the alphabet with the attempt to register development and to document development by the evolution of forms. Based on the shared model of the alphabet and on the common necessity to classify their empirical material, natural history and the description of culture were related attempts in the middle of the eighteenth century to comprehend the alphabetically organized nature and a naturally ordered culture. (shrink)

This work is organized alphabetically and more like a dictionary than an encyclopedia.

Different writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping. Do these writing system differences influence how first language (L1) literacy experiences affect cognitive processes in learning to read a second language (L2)? Two groups of college students who were learning to read English as a second language (ESL) were examined for their relative reliance on phonological and orthographic processing in English word identification: Korean students with an alphabetic L1 literacy background, and Chinese students with a (...) nonalphabetic L1 literacy background. In a semantic category judgment task, Korean ESL learners made more false positive errors in judging stimuli that were homophones to category exemplars than they did in judging spelling controls. However, there were no significant differences in responses to stimuli in these two conditions for Chinese ESL learners. Chinese ESL learners, on the other hand, made more accurate responses to stimuli that were less similar in spelling to category exemplars than those that were more similar. Chinese ESL learners may rely less on phonological information and more on orthographic information in identifying English words than their Korean counterparts. Further evidence supporting this argument came from a phoneme deletion task in which Chinese subjects performed more poorly overall than their Korean counterparts and made more errors that were phonologically incorrect but orthographically acceptable. We suggest that cross-writing system differences in L1s and L1 reading skills transfer could be responsible for these ESL performance differences. (shrink)

Lettered selves and beyond -- The alphabetic body -- Gesture and non-alphabetic writing -- Technologized mathematics -- Parallel selves -- Ghost effects.

Of the hundreds of Greek common nouns and adjectives preserved in our MSS of Cicero, about three dozen are found written in the Latin alphabet as well as in the Greek. So we find, alongside συμπάθεια, alsosympathia, and ἱστορικός as well ashistoricus.This sort of variation has been termed alphabet-switching; it has received little attention in connection with Cicero, even though it is relevant to subjects of current interest such as his bilingualism and the role of code-switching and loanwords (...) in his works. Rather than addressing these issues directly, this discussion sets out information about the way in which the words are written in our surviving MSS of Cicero and takes further some recent work on the presentation of Greek words in Latin texts. It argues that, for the most part, coherent patterns and explanations can be found in the alphabetic choices exhibited by them, or at least by the earliest of them when there is conflict in the paradosis, and that this coherence is evidence for a generally reliable transmission of Cicero's original choices. While a lack of coherence might indicate unreliable transmission, or even an indifference on Cicero's part, a consistent pattern can only really be explained as an accurate record of coherent alphabet choice made by Cicero when writing Greek words. (shrink)

This article considers the origins of alphabetic writing, tracing its probable source to ancient Egypt, southern Levant or the Sinai during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (17th century BCE). It supports the view that the earliest scripts were acrophonic representations of a West-Semitic language, whose use developed under the rule of the Hyksos in Egypt but was arrested there with the expulsion of this foreign dynasty at the end of the 16th century BCE. The development is then traced through the Levant, (...) with particular attention given to the emergence of cuneiform alphabetic scripts in Ugarit (c. 1300 BCE). This form of writing disappeared with the fall of Ugarit, but linear alphabetic scripts were preserved in a variety of Near-Eastern languages, notably Aramaic and Phoenician. These two languages, by becoming linguae francae respectively of the Syria-northern Mesopotamia and the Anatolia-Eastern Mediterranean regions, brought about the spread of alphabetic writing up until the 8th century BCE. The article concludes by examining the influence of the Phoenician script on Greek, Etruscan and ultimately Latin forms of writing. (shrink)

In today’s world, there are more than 5000 languages and dialects in use, of which only 100 may be considered of major importance. As Dreyfuss (1972) states, inter-communication amongst them has proved not just difficult but impossible. Because a universal language would be the solution to this problem, over 800 attempts have in fact been made in the last 1000 years to develop an official second language that in time could be adopted by all major countries. Some of the most (...) recognized examples are Esperanto, Interlingua, Ido and Volapuk. However, all of them combine elements of existing languages and rely on the Roman alphabet, which reduces their applicability to certain regions of the world. The aim of this project is to explore the world of pictographic communication and develop an effective system for conveying information/knowledge on a universal scale. This would potentially bridge linguistic and cultural gaps, transcending boundaries, and thereby creating a broader vision of multiculturalism. In this sense, we find useful the notion of ‘semantography’, from the Greek word semanticos, significant meaning, and graphin, to write. The term was coined by Charles K. Bliss in 1947 to define his development of a non-alphabetical symbol writing system, based on the principles of ideographic writing and chemical symbolism. Semantography was the name of Charles K. Bliss’ proposed book for the Blissymbolic communication system. (shrink)

Our manuscripts of Cicero contain dozens of Greek words that are presented in some passages in Greek letters, and in others are transliterated into Latin. In a recent paper I collected the evidence for this phenomenon in connection with common nouns and adjectives, surveyed scholarship to date and posited an interpretative framework which is assumed in this study also. Key components of this framework are the use of mixed alphabets in surviving ancient documents and an awareness of the frequency with (...) which modern editors change the alphabets in the manuscripts when dealing with Greek words—hence the importance of using the apparatus critici, not just the printed text, of our editions. The earlier paper was also strict in its exclusion of words in continuous passages, and even short phrases, of Greek, since that context excludes the option of transliteration for the author. The major contention of that earlier study was that a coherent pattern of use in the manuscripts can only really be a reflection of Cicero's own considered choice of alphabets: consistently inexplicable choice may indicate that Cicero himself was indifferent to which alphabet he used for single Greek words, or that our copyists paid no attention to this aspect of their exemplars, or both. (shrink)