ENG 346: Aspects of the English Language |
|
ENG 346: Aspects of the English Language By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do each of the following:
Read Chapter
15 of Contemporary Linguistics before you come to class on Monday. Design a visual aid for your presentation. We will work on this assignment during class on Friday. Think Fast:
Analyze the orthography of the word I assign you in class. Presentation:
Writing (Professor Canada) Cooperative Learning: Respond to questions 1, 2, 3, and 4
at the end of Chapter 15 of Contemporary Linguistics. Discussion: During
this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged
during our “Think Fast” exercise, my presentation, and cooperative learning. Workshop: Use
what you have learned in this lesson to design a visual aid to use in your
presentation. Think Again: Using
what you have learned or reviewed in this lesson, interpret a personal
encounter with English writing. Conferences: During
these one-on-one conferences, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz
you on lesson objectives, and field your questions. Announcements: We
will wrap up this lesson with announcements regarding upcoming lessons, as
well as other relevant subjects. Make sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following terms:
The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language contains extensive information
on English writing. |
IntroductionIn our last several lessons, we have examined aspects of the spoken language. In this lesson, we turn to the systems by which we convert this spoken language to graphic representation—that is, writing and printing. DiscussionWriting
Although linguists generally focus on speech, English and many other languages also live separate lives in books, newspapers, letters, and various other places where the sounds of speech are represented in graphic symbols. In most respects, this form of language--which we might call "transcribed speech"--is identical to the spoken language; that is, it conveys meaning through words arranged in sentences. In a few interesting ways, however, the language that appears on a page or screen is different from its spoken counterpart. Perhaps the most noticeable and important distinction is
the means by which we represent objects and ideas. In speech, we use
sounds--or, to be more precise, phonemes--along with pauses and other cues to
form words and sentences. When we write letters and type essays, on the
other hand, we use a system of graphic symbols, including letters and
punctuation marks. For instance, the part of this system that deals
with the arrangement of letters is called "orthography"--or,
more simply, "spelling." For a number of reasons, including a
long history of sound changes, English orthography is not phonetic; that is,
each letter does not correspond to a single sound. For example, the
letter "c" can represent a voiceless velar stop, as in "cat,"
or a voiceless alveolar fricative, as in "receive." As a
result, both native and non-native speakers often struggle when learning to
spell English words, especially ones such as "colonel,"
"knight," "weight," and "separate."
Indeed, many English speakers, including Irish playwright George Bernard
Shaw, have called for spelling reform, generally to no avail. When studying the graphic representation of English, we
also should consider the specific medium. For the first millienium of
its existence, English was transcribed almost exclusively through
handwriting. For example, the Bible and other books were created by
scribes--people, often monks, charged with copying language. The
results are what we call manuscripts, a term derived from the
Latin words manu (hand) and scriptus (writing). In the middle of the
15th century, a German businessman named Johannes Gutenberg
revolutionized book production when he developed movable type and a printing
process that came to be known as letterpress. In this
process, printers such as Gutenberg took individual letters, each cast in a
raised position on a small block, and arranged them backwards in a frame, or
chase. When they finished the chase, which usually contained between two and
16 pages, they placed it on the bed of the printing press, applied ink to the
raised letters, and laid a sheet of paper over the frame. By applying
pressure to the paper with a large plate, they forced the ink on the letters
to make an impression on the paper. This method, which was popular until the
middle of the 19th century, enabled printers to produce and reproduce books
relatively quickly and cheaply. Using the letterpress method, William
Caxton established a printing business in London in 1476, eventually
printing some 100 books there. Because his books--and the standardized
English contained within them--reached many parts of England, some scholars
have credited him with helping to bring about a standard English dialect at a
time when, as Caxton himself complained in one preface, residents of
different parts of the country had trouble understanding one another. In the last few centuries, printing has undergone several more developments. The monotype machine, invented in the 19th century, allowed printers to cast an individual piece of type simply by pressing a key, as though typing. Similarly, the linotype machine allowed operators to cast type by pressing keys, in this case casting an entire line of type instead of individual letters. This form of typesetting, which was invented in 1886 in New York, was the most common in America until the 1950s. Since that time, printers have used offset printing, in which letters are photographed instead of cast in type. After photographing pages, printers shine light through the negatives onto photosensitive plates, causing letters and pictures to appear on the plates, where they will accept ink. These thin plates then are wrapped around rollers, inked, and pressed against rubber rollers, which then are pressed against rolls of paper, creating pages. The development of movable type introduced the art of typography, or type design. Early type designers such as Nicolaus Jenson and Aldus Manutius knew that each letter in the English alphabet must be fairly distinctive; that is, an a must look about the same on any piece of movable type. They also knew, however, that they could introduce an infinite number of small variations to the design of each letter. For example, they could use tiny lines, or serifs, on the ends of letters. They also could vary the thickness of the strokes in the letters or the consistency of the space they occupied on a page. The results were hundreds of different typefaces-- particular sets of letters, a through z, along with punctuation marks, designed to be used together in printing a body of text. In the 15th century, for example, the Frenchman Jenson perfected Roman typefaces, clean faces that replaced the dense, highly ornamented Gothic typefaces that Gutenberg and others had used. In the 20th century, British type designer Stanley Morris gave the world some of its most popular typefaces, including Baskerville, Garamond, and Times New Roman. Whether handwritten by scribes or printed in one of the various printing processes, the letters and other symbols that make up the graphic form of a language eventually must appear somewhere--on the pages of a book, for example, or on a computer screen. Traditionally, printers began with a piece of foolscap, a standard-sized sheet of parchment, which was made from sheepskin or goatskin; vellum, made from calfskin; or paper, made from wood pulp or other plant fibers. If they folded this sheet only once, they produced two leaves; since each leaf could be printed on both sides, this sheet with a single fold had four pages. When bookbinders assembled all of these sheets, each now called a signature, the result was a type of book called a folio. If the foolscap was folded twice, once in each direction, each signature had four leaves, eight pages. Books made up of these signatures were called quartos. Other popular book sizes included octavos and 16mos. Especially during the days of the early manuscripts and the incunabula, books printed before 1500, books could be highly ornamented works of art. In addition to text, some featured ornate initial letters called rubrications and painted designs called illuminations. PracticeBelow are some activities designed to help you master the knowledge and skills covered in this unit.
ConclusionIn this lesson, we have examined the history of writing and printing, as well as the English writing system in particular. Next week, you will take your oral examinations. |
