What is natural in writing?

Abstract

Naturalness Theory (NT) is founded on the notion of naturalness and claims that when a linguistic phenomenon can be processed by humans with little effort, both sensomotorically and cognitively, it is deemed more natural compared to other, more complex phenomena. Drawing on evidence such as language change, language acquisition, and language disorders, various parameters of naturalness (e.g., biuniqueness, constructional iconicity) have been postulated, which focus on the phonological and morphological subsystems of language. This paper offers an outline of how naturalness can be adapted to grapholinguistic phenomena. Comparative graphematics (cf. Weingarten 2011), extended to comparative grapholinguistics, is assessed as a method that can be used to reveal naturalness parameters which apply to both material (graphetic) and linguistic (graphematic) aspects of writing. The reduction of extrinsic symmetry across various scripts will be discussed as an example. By integrating these preliminary theoretical ideas into the framework of NT, it is demonstrated that so-called Natural Grapholinguistics could offer promising new insights as well as a tertium comparationis method for future comparative analyses of scripts and writing systems.

The grapheme as a universal basic unit of writing

“…In general, comparative analyses across various types of writing systems become more difficult without a shared conceptual and terminological framework, which might be the main reason why they are so rare. 2 Comparison, however, is the crux of an emerging theory of writing (Meletis, 2018), and in order to compare diverse writing systems, we are in need of a benchmark. Therefore, positing a concept of grapheme and defining it in a broad manner, thereby making it applicable to all writing systems and facilitating comparisons between them, represents an important and promising endeavour for the advancement of grapholinguistics.…”