Grapholinguistics in the 21st century—From graphemes to knowledge

G21C (Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century) is a biennial conference bringing together disciplines concerned with grapholinguistics and more generally the study of writing systems and their representation in written communication. The conference aims to reflect on the current state of research in the area, and on the role that writing and writing systems play in neighboring disciplines like computer science and information technology, communication, typography, psychology, and pedagogy. In particular it aims to study the effect of the growing importance of Unicode with regard to the future of reading and writing in human societies. Reflecting the richness of perspectives on writing systems, G21C is actively interdisciplinary, and welcomes proposals from researchers from the fields of computer science and information technology, linguistics, communication, pedagogy, psychology, history, and the social sciences.

G21C aims to create a space for the discussion of the range of approaches to writing systems, and specifically to bridge approaches in linguistics, informatics, and other fields. It will provide a forum for explorations in terminology, methodology, and theoretical approaches relating to the delineation of an emerging interdisciplinary area of research that intersects with intense activity in practical implementations of writing systems.

The Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century 2020 Conference is kindly endorsed by ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) and by ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale).

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The first edition of G21C was held in Brest, France, on June 14-15, 2018. The next edition of G21C is scheduled to take place in Palaiseau (near Paris), on June 8-10, 2022.

Sponsorized by IMT Atlantique and LabSTICC CNRS laboratory (UMR 6285)

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Program

June 17th, 2020

  • 8:50 CEST Conference Opening Greetings
  • 9:00 CEST Keynote Presentation:
    Neef, Martin. — What Is It That Ends with a Full Stop?
    It is often assumed that punctuation marks such as the full stop end sentences. Such a statement only works if the sentence in written language is a different term than a sentence in grammar. I will try to distinguish between these two concepts, thereby reflecting on the general relationship between spoken and written language.

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  • 10:00 CEST
    Meletis, Dimitrios. — Is the Syllable Universally the Most Salient Unit of Writing?
    This talk addresses two questions: Firstly, is the phonological syllable the central linguistic unit for writing? Evidence suggests that syllabic writing systems are easier to learn and that syllables play a crucial role in reading and writing. Secondly, do writing systems exhibit suprasegmental “syllabic” structures that are independent of phonology? How are they defined and what role do they play?

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  • 10:30 CEST
    Evertz-Rittich, Martin. — What Is a Written Word and If So, How Many
    In this talk, we will discuss how we can define the notoriously elusive unit word in writing. We will start by examining definitions of the graphematic word in alphabetical writing systems and discuss how the written word relates to other units in writing and in phonology. Finally, we will have a look at non-alphabetic writing systems, such as Chinese and Japanese.

          CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD SLIDES (1.5 MB)
  • 11:00 CEST Pause
  • 11:10 CEST
    Osterkamp, Sven and Gordian Schreiber: Challenging the Dichotomy between Phonography and Morphography: Transitions and Grey Areas
    This talk revisits the fundamental distinction between phonography and morphography on the level of graphs (as opposed to overall writing systems), drawing upon cases from three areas: 1) transitions from morphograms to phonograms and vice-versa; 2) considerations of semantics in the choice of phonograms; 3) grey areas in which a given graph is indeterminable as to its typological status.

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  • 11:40 CEST
    Harbour, Daniel. — Vowel Writing and the Role of Grammar in Writing System Evolution
    Unwritten vowels are a recurrent feature of Afroasiatic writing systems, but they decline sharply when such systems are borrowed by non-Afroasiatic languages (compare, e.g., Phoenician and Greek). I argue that these differences are at root morphosyntactic not phonological and that they illustrate a broader thesis, that grammar is a driving force in writing system evolution.

          CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD DOCUMENT (201 kB)
  • 12:10 CEST
    Jee, Hana, Monica Tamariz and Richard Shillcock. — Quantifying Sound-Graphic Systematicity and Application on Multiple Phonographs
    The study is to show that the relation between letters and sounds is not perfectly arbitrary. I found small but significant letter-sound correlations across six conventional orthographies. No correlation was found in fictitious orthographies. It looks like human orthography systems have evolved in a way to maximise the systematicity because it is how our brain works.

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  • 12:40 CEST Pause

  • 14:00 CEST
    Taha, Haitham. — The Role of Semantic Activation during Word Recognition in Arabic among Typical and Poor Readers
    In this talk I'll present and experiment that shows how knowing the meaning of words contribute to the reading accuracy and speed of these words. Knowing the meaning of the word that we read, and even we are not familiar with its written pattern, contributes to the reading accuracy and speed.

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  • 14:30 CEST
    Rashwan, Hany. — Comparing the Visual Untranslatability of Ancient Egyptian and Arabic Writing Systems
    The paper discusses the mechanism of visual jinās (roughly meaning wordplay) in both ancient Egyptian and Arabic languages. It demonstrates the significance of looking into several overlooked visual aesthetics, which were mainly designed to stimulate the eyes and minds of the indigenous readers, to shape any theory related to the literary meaning of ancient Egyptian or Arabic writing systems.

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  • 15:00 CEST
    Donnelly, Kevin. — Digitising Swahili in Arabic Script
    This presentation argues that script displacement (an older script S1 being replaced by a newer script S2) can be offset by transitioning S1 heritage manuscripts to a fully digital format (rather than, say, digital scans). It presents tools enabling this for Swahili in Arabic script (the principles could apply elsewhere), showing the varied layouts possible in the resulting pdf documents.

          CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD DOCUMENT (2 MB)
  • 15:30 CEST
    Ashourinia, Kaveh. — Quantifying the Ambiguity of No Short Vowels in Persian Writing
    The absence of short vowels and the duality role of a few consonants as long vowels in Persian writing amplifies the ambiguity of written words. This contributes to ambiguity in sentences, introducing challenges when using search engines, databases and during transliteration from and to Persian. This study introduces an analytic approach to quantifying this ambiguity.

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  • 16:00 CEST Pause
  • 16:10 CEST POSTER SESSION A
    • Fedorova, Liudmila. — To the Typology of Writing Systems
      The presentation aims to show the itinerary going from picture messages to alphabets, from linguistic emblems to characters. The dimensions used are: linear/nonlinear (emblematic), integral or decomposed, reduced/complete writing (from omitting vowels to the Greek ‘democracy’ for vowels). The main antinomy trends are differentiation and integration of writing units, so that we have today the coexistence of emblems-emoticons, Chinese characters and highly differentiated alphabets.

      CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD SLIDES (987 kB)      DOWNLOAD PAPERS (3.8 MB)      DOWNLOAD BOOK (174.1 MB)
    • 16:10-16:40 CEST Schoch, Robert M. and Tomi S. Melka. — A “Sacred Amulet from Easter Island – 1885/6 –”: Analyzing Enigmatic Glyphic Characters in the Context of the rongorongo Script
      The rongorongo script of Easter Island has eluded an agreed upon decipherment, hampered fundamentally by a small corpus. A newly discovered artifact (collected in 1885/6) displays a dozen rongorongo-like signs, including an apparently previously unknown glyph and the second recorded occurrence of the “full moon” glyph. Initial analysis of the piece suggests a “lunar-based calendar” designed for propitiatory and/or divination purposes.

      CONTACT THE AUTHORS      SLIDES (6.9 MB)
    • 16:40-17:10 CEST Melka, Tomi S. and Robert M. Schoch. — A Case in Point: Communication with Unknown Intelligence/s
      We discuss, from a semiotic perspective, one important variable—anthropocentrism—present in various proposed messages intended to communicate with off-world intelligences. Our review of different scenarios reveals embedded flaws to various degrees. This should not be a reason for desisting in the pursuit of SETI-style (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) passive “listening” or active “messaging” programs; however, in tandem with such SETI-style programs, a robust and efficient strategy for potential contact should be developed as well.

      CONTACT THE AUTHORS      SLIDES (10.2 MB)
    • Verheijen, Lieke. — The Effects of Emoji and Emoticons in Webcare
      When responding to online consumer messages (especially complaints), organizations can choose to use emoji in their digital writing. But does the addition of these tiny visual elements in so-called webcare improve consumers' perceptions of the organization, such as corporate reputation or brand evaluations? My research suggests that overall it does, mostly by making the writing sound more conversational and human.

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    • Véry, Dalma. — The Mediality of Typography and Textual Space
      The presentation aims to explore typography and textual space from semiological and phenomenological perspectives to reveal the characteristics and possibilities inherent in print and digital media.

      CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD POSTER (3.4 MB)      DOWNLOAD REFERENCES (80 kB)
    • Vlachou, Irene and Laurence Penney. — Parametric Fallback Fonts for the Web
      FauxFoundry is a webfont service providing matching synthetic fonts to expand the character set of Latin fonts. Web developers drag-drop Latin fonts onto the FauxFoundry website, which generates CSS code that the developer incorporates into their own website. We designed a parametric font, which varies over 12 variation axes in response to 12 measurements taken from key characters in the Latin font.

      CONTACT THE AUTHORS      DOWNLOAD POSTER (942 kB)      DOWNLOAD DOCUMENT (56.6 MB)      DOWNLOAD SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL (164.7 MB)
  • 17:10 CEST
    Presutti, Stefano. — The Interdependence between Speech and Writing. Towards a Greater Awareness
    This paper investigates the relationships developed over time between speech and writing, especially in the Western world. Nowadays their relations are becoming more complex in the digital arena, challenged by intersections of technical resources and multiple needs of individuals and language communities. The paper discusses why is important today to develop a greater awareness on the complexity of their interdependence.

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  • 17:40 CEST
    Gnanadesikan, Amalia. — S1: The Native Script Effect
    Many linguists believe firmly that writing and language are cognitively fundamentally different. Yet various evidence suggests not only that scripts have grammatical properties but that one’s first script (S1) dominates later-learned scripts (S2) analogously to how one’s first language (L1) dominates L2. This effect can explain the curious historical fact that the world’s many written languages use relatively few scripts.

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  • 18:10 CEST End of Day 1

June 18th, 2020

This day is dedicated to the memory of Dominique Boutet, who passed away a few days before the conference, from COVID-19.

  • 9:00 CEST POSTER SESSION B
    • Bianchini, Claudia Savina. — How to Improve Metalinguistic Awareness by Writing a Language without Writing: Sign Languages and Sign Writing
      One of the advantages of Writing is the possibility to "freeze" the orality, allowing to reflect on the language characteristics and to generate metalinguistic awareness. The Sign Languages used by the deaf miss a writing system, but several attempts exist for representing them graphically. Among these, SignWriting, which seems well suited for promoting metalinguistic thinking, thanks to its high readability.

      CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD POSTER (3.5 MB)
    • Drozhashchikh, Nataliia, Elena Efimova and Evgenia Meshcheryakova. — Form-Meaning Regularities in Old English Thesaurus and Corpora
      The authors focus on correlation between the initial grapheme/lexical semantics in A Thesaurus of Old English/corpora to reveal non-random form-meaning association. Referential meanings of words starting with ‹w›, ‹s›, ‹h› and ‹p› were explored. The application of methodology (chi-square test and coefficient of contingency) enabled us to provide statistically relevant evidence of such correlation and shed light on the form-meaning hypothesis.

      CONTACT THE AUTHORS      DOWNLOAD POSTER (277 kB)      DOWNLOAD MATERIAL (351 kB)      YOUTUBE VIDEO
    • Giunashvili, Helen. — Old Aramaic Script in Georgia
      Old Aramaic and its script are mostly important for the history of the Georgian culture. On the territory of contemporary Georgia, particularly in its Eastern part, being historically Iberian kingdom (4th c. BC – 4th c. AD), a number of original Aramaic inscriptions are found. They are inscribed on different objects and could be dated by the period of 3rd c. BC - 3rd c. AD. The greater part of these Aramaic inscriptions is executed in a variety of the North-Mesopotamian type of Aramaic script, known as “Armazian”, one of the outgrowths of the Imperial (Official) Aramaic writing, widely used in Achaemenid Empire (550 BC – 330 BC). The whole corpus of the Aramaic inscriptions of Georgia requires systematic interdisciplinary researches, for revealing the main trends of its typological development in the light of Near Eastern-South Caucasian cultural-linguistic interference.

      CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD PAPER (5.2 MB)
    • Joyce, Terry and Hisashi Masuda. — Constructing a Database of Japanese Compound Words: Some Observations on the Morphological Structures of Three- and Four-Kanji Compound Words
      Japanese kanji function as the core building blocks for the graphematic representation of a considerable proportion of the Japanese lexicon.  This presentation reports on the ongoing construction of a database of Japanese compound words, with particular focus on analyzing the morphological structures of three-kanji compound words (3KCWs) and four-kanji compound words (4KCWs).

      CONTACT THE AUTHORS      DOWNLOAD SLIDES (181 kB)
    • Morioka, Tomohiko. — Viewpoints on the Structural Description of Chinese Characters
      Many Chinese characters are complex characters composed of multiple components. However, it is not always clear what their structure and components are. In this presentation, the author focuses on the productivity of the components.

      CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD SLIDES (1.7 MB)
    • Myers, James. — Levels of Structure within Chinese Character Constituents
      Chinese characters are composed of morpheme-like constituents, themselves composed of phoneme-like strokes. I argue that in between these levels there is also a level of syllable-like units, which can undergo stress-like prominence, have onset-rime-like internal structure, and compete for space within a constituent the way real syllables do.

      CONTACT THE AUTHOR      SLIDES (196 kB)
  • 10:00 CEST
    Colin Loh Jia Sheng and Francesco Perono Cacciafoco. — A New Approach to the Decipherment of Linear A: Coding to Decipher Linear A, Stage 2 (Cryptanalysis and Language Deciphering: A ‘Brute Force Attack’ on an Undeciphered Writing System)
    Linear A is one of the writing systems of the Ancient Aegean Minoan civilization of Crete. Unlike Linear B, derived from Linear A, Linear A remains undeciphered despite numerous attempts. With differing arguments made about deciphering Linear A, we aim to develop a software using Python that enables significant clusters of Linear A symbols to be isolated and analysed.

          CONTACT THE AUTHORS      DOWNLOAD SLIDES (3.7 MB)
  • 10:30 CEST
    Salgarella, Ester and Simon Castellan. — SigLA. The Signs of Linear A: A Linguistic and Palaeographic Database
    This paper presents an interactive database of inscriptions written in Linear A, a writing system used in Bronze Age Crete to write the still undeciphered Minoan language. The database (under construction) will allow users to overcome the limits set by the traditional print corpus, by carrying out combinatory palaeographic and linguistic searches, thus making the most of the existing evidence.

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  • 11:00 CEST Pause
  • 11:10 CEST
    Elti di Rodeano, Sveva. — Scripts in Contact: The Transmission of the First Alphabets
    The transmission of the alphabet is often presented as unidirectional, from the Levant to the Mediterranean, via the Greeks and Romans across Europe (Gelb 1963). A new approach allows a less decisive role for the Greeks (Waal 2018, 2020), leaving unaddressed the mode of transmission. Reports about teaching methods in ancient literatures highlight the underlying cognitive processes in the spelling and visual composition. The theoretical frame based upon Caramazza-Miceli (1990) will be used to explain how the transmission of the first alphabets could have taken place.

          CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD REFERENCES (266 kB)
  • 11:40 CEST
    Pierson, Morgane. — Beyond the Semantic: Typographic Representation of Ancient Monetary Inscriptions
    The PIM project aims to assess the needs and meet the expectations of researchers, publishers, and the BNF, by creating a typeface to transcribe, publish and analyze the information contained on monetary inscriptions, beyond their semantic content. In partnership with the ANRT the writing systems studied are, inter alia, the Phoenician, Punic, Archaïc Greek, Paleo-Hebrew, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, and Nabatean. (See here and here.)

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  • 12:10 CEST
    Fendel, Victoria Beatrix. — A Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for a People: The Beginnings of the Coptic Alphabet
    The paper looks at the beginnings of the Coptic alphabet in first- and second-century Egypt from different angles. It reviews and builds on the sometimes-contradictory research from a social perspective also considering practical challenges for the ancient writers. It explores the relevance of cognitive factors in the transition to the first alphabetic writing system for the Egyptian language.

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  • 12:40 CEST Pause

  • 14:00 CEST Keynote Presentation:
    Coon, Jessica. — The Linguistics of Arrival: What an Alien Writing System Can Teach Us about Human Language
    If aliens arrived, could we communicate with them? How different can languages be from one another? Do these differences have bigger consequences for how we see the world? And how might differences in writing systems reflect or influence cognition? Jessica Coon, linguistics consultant for the film Arrival, will discuss these and other questions through the lens of the Heptapod language.

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  • 15:00 CEST
    Landragin, Frédéric, Yannis Haralambous and Kenichi Handa. — Graphemic and graphetic methods in speculative fiction
    Some authors of speculative fiction (science-fiction, fantasy, etc.) use innovative writing methods in their texts, involving the graphemic level (nonstandard orthographies, “eye dialect,” interlinear annotations, etc.) or the graphetic level (typographic arrangements inspired by visual poetry or calligrams, font change, use of color or affine transformations, etc.). We attempt a survey and classification of these methods.

          CONTACT THE AUTHORS      DOWNLOAD SLIDES (14.7 MB)      DOWNLOAD SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL (65.4 MB)
  • 15:30 CEST
    Kettaneh, Christine. — Mute Melodies
    A short tour through an artist's work that investigates the boundaries of language and systems in research-based projects that are simultaneously sculptural and performative, and that articulates language as both excavated material and excavation technique. Or, alternatively, an artist’s journey through everyday matter: soap on the wash basin, ants in the garden, sugar on the kitchen table, keys in locks—language in the mouth.

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  • 16:00 CEST Pause
  • 16:10 CEST
    Wachendorff, Irmi. — Typographetics of Urban Spaces - the Indication of Discourse Types and Genres through Letterforms and Their Materiality in Multilingual Urban Spaces
    In my ongoing thesis I am looking at social dimensions of typographic activity in urban spaces – as part of the interdisciplinary research project “Signs of the Metropolis: Visual Multilingualism in the Ruhr Area”. In this presentation I will focus on how discourse types (such as regulatory, commercial and transgressive) as well as certain shop types are indicated by graphetic characteristics.

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  • 16:40 CEST
    Hutto, Megan. — Press Rightward-Facing Triangle: Metaphor and Cross-Cultural Semiotics in Phone Applications
    Phone applications are an assumed part of modern life for many people. These applications use a small set of symbols to convery the ways that a user can interact with the app. As a part of a larger research program developing an app for language documentation, this project seeks to test if these symbols actually can be used in any cultural context.

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  • 17:10 CEST
    Danet, Claire, Dominique Boutet†, Patrick Doan, Claudia Savina Bianchini, Adrien Contesse, Léa Chèvrefils, Morgane Rébulard, Chloé Thomas and Jean-François Dauphin. — Transcribing Sign Languages with Typannot: A Typographic System Which Retains and Displays Multiple Levels of Information
    Typannot is a typographic system to transcribe sign languages. Its structure is based on the human body, containing several layers of information and allowing new ways to analyse and understand gestural languages. In this talk, we will show you the Typannot system, our work process and tools we are developing to make Typannot fully accessible.

          CONTACT THE AUTHORS      DOWNLOAD SLIDES (41.4 MB)
  • 17:40 CEST
    Handel, Zev. — Is Logographic a Valid Script Category? Evidence from Historical Borrowing of the Chinese-Character Script
    Linguists typically divide symbols in writing systems into two types: representing sound alone (like b) and representing meaningful linguistic units (like & representing ‘and’). But the categorization of scripts as of one type or the other has been challenged. I argue that patterns of borrowing of the Chinese script support the traditional view that its characters represent meaningful linguistic units.

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  • 18:10 CEST
    Milo, Thomas. — DecoType ACE in TeX. Implementing the Advanced Composition Engine in LuaTeX
    In Robert Bringhurst words “[DecoType Tasmeem] is based on a very close and careful study of classical script. At the same time, it’s a modern tool – an extremely sophisticated piece of applied analysis. It’s a wonderful object lesson, in fact, in humane, intelligent digital engineering. And it’s not made for dummies. It leaves the typesetter free to decide just how much or little ornamentation there will be in each line of text, and where the ornamentation will go.” DecoType integrated a novel, automated successor of Tasmeem in LuaTeX (a typesetting program based on Donald Knuth's TeX).

          CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD DOCUMENT (398 kB)
  • 18:40 CEST End of Day 2

June 19th, 2020

  • 9:00 CEST
    Dürst, Martin J. — Between Characters and Glyphs - the Case of Han Characters
    Theory distinguishes between graphemes and graphs, technology between characters and glyphs. This presentation will look at the space between those two levels, called basic shapes, for the case of Sinographs, the characters used to write Chinese and Japanese. In our analysis, the openness of this script plays a very important role.

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  • 9:30 CEST
    Ugray, Gábor. — Progress Report on Hanzi Network Dictionary, a Shape-Based, Etymologically Motivated Character Decomposition Dataset with Functional Annotations
    I report on my effort to create a computer-readable character decomposition dataset that is functionally motivated as opposed to form-based; aims at historical correctness; treats stroke outlines as first-class citizens; and employs a precise formalism to encode component contributions. The outcome will enable novel learning tools and facilitate the empirical analysis of the Chinese script.

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  • 10:00 CEST
    Honda, Keisuke. — A Modular Theoretic Approach to the Japanese Writing System: Possibilities and Challenges
    The Modular Theory of Writing Systems (Neef 2012, 2015) provides a general framework for a descriptive and comparative analysis of phonographic writing systems, especially those based on phonological segments (e.g., German). In this presentation, I will explore its potential applicability to highly logographic writing systems through a partial analysis of the current Japanese writing system.

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  • 10:30 CEST
    Kelly, Piers. — The Otomaung Alphabet of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea: Documenting a New Script by Long-Distance Correspondence in a Politically Sensitive Environment
    This talk reports on a new writing system developed for by a separatist cultural movement on the island of Bougainville. I describe the features of the system, its ethnographic setting and political motivations, in the context of other comparable scripts invented in recent times.

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  • 11:00 CEST Pause
  • 11:10 CEST
    Xu, Duoduo. — Digitizing Dongba Pictographs: Semantic Index for a Unicode Database
    This presentation is about semantic index aimed at building-up of a comprehensive database of the Dongba Script, Dongba being the religion of the Nakhi people of Southwest China. The author applies the notion of radical to the analysis of Dongba pictographs.

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  • 11:40 CEST
    Salomon, Corinna. — Comparative Perspectives on the Study of Script Transfer, and the Origin of the Runic Script
    Departing from the notion that the assumption of a creative mind who tampered with the model alphabet suffices to explain the peculiarities of the Runic script, the paper discusses the role of ingenious inventors in script transfer in a comparative perspective.

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  • 12:10 CEST
    Huot-Marchand, Thomas and Johannes Bergerhausen. — The Missing Scripts
    In roughly 5,500 years, mankind has created 290 writing systems like Latin, Greek, Arabic or Chinese. As of today (Unicode 13.0), we can use 154 of them on our computers and smart phones. But at the same time this means that 136 scripts are still missing on our computers. These are the obscure, the historical and the so-called ‘Minority Scripts’.

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  • 12:40 CEST Pause

  • 14:00 CEST
    Stojanov, Tomislav. — The Sociolinguistics of Punctuation - What Can We Infer about Our Language by Observing the Evolution of Punctuation?
    In this presentation I am going to elaborate the thesis that the evolution of punctuation reveals many interesting sociolinguistic aspects of a language. A study on the evolution of punctuation in historical grammar books might give us a new insight into the development of language codification and standardization processes.

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  • 14:30 CEST
    Neuman, Yishai. — Sociocultural Motivation for Spelling Variation in Modern Hebrew
    Ideology and culture may at times constitute a factor in motivating spelling variation in variable social environments. Such ideological tendencies and social perceptions may stem from religious taboo or represent modern political or seemingly-historic nuances, as well as ideas of social rights and equality of chances. The talk addresses these factors in motivating spelling variation in Modern Hebrew.

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  • 15:00 CEST
    Kulish, Olga. — Between the Words: Emotional Punctuation in the Digital Age Communication
    The project “Between the words: emotional punctuation” looks at punctuation as an expressive element of visual and text communication. It aims to explore the variety of ways of using punctuation marks, to discover the unconventional punctuation and to demonstrate the unlimited possibilities for experimenting with the shapes and meanings.

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  • 15:30 CEST
    Mourad, Ghassan, Dana Awad and Marie-Rose Al-Amil. — The Role of Punctuation in Translation
    We study the role of punctuation in the translation process of decoding the meaning and form of the source text and recoding them in the target text. This will make us answer the question: is it possible to translate punctuation? And why do translators sometimes punctuate the target text differently? We will then explain the problems that punctuation marks constitute in machine translation and in computer assisted translation.

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  • 16:00 CEST Pause
  • 16:10 CEST
    Küster, Marc Wilhelm. — Mystic Messages – The Magic of Writing
    Writing systems are sign systems that often encode meaning beyond spoken language. Using examples from different periods—antiquity, middle ages, and the present—and places—Mesopotamia, Europe, and Japan—the talk studies strategies that practitioners imaged would imbue their written messages with magic or help them to extract hidden meanings from sacred texts.

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  • 16:40 CEST
    Koch, Christian. — Wikimoldia - Digital Revitalization of the Moldovan Language
    Wikimoldia was a website on which the Romanian Wikipedia was automatically transliterated into Cyrillic. This presentation deals with the technical background and links the Wikimoldia-project to the political and linguistic controversies surrounding the status of the Moldovan language. The use of this kind of machine transliteration can also be interesting for the work with other multi-alphabetic languages.

          CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD SLIDES (1.7 MB)
  • 17:10 CEST
    Wöhrmann, Frithjof. — Limitless Script-Choice? How Romanian Writing during the 19th Century Reveals the Limits of Current Understandings of ‘Writing System’
    As an emergent field, many foundational concepts in grapholinguistics are not yet agreed upon. My study on Cyrillic-Roman mixed writing in 19th century Romania advances our understanding of what a ‘writing system’ is. It allows me to argue for transcendental literacies, i.e., transliteracies, that go beyond externally named scripts and focus instead on local practices.

          CONTACT THE AUTHOR      DOWNLOAD DOCUMENT (548 kB)
  • 17:40 CEST
    Presutti, Stefano. — Graphemic Complexity for the New Romance Phonemes in Italian: Some Reflections
    This presentation focuses the attention on some cases of grapho-phonological inconsistency in a shallow writing system such as Italian. I attempt to explain why this inconsistency involves especially the New Romance phonemes, by examining similar characteristics related to their historical development (including some unsuccessful spelling reforms), phonological markedness and language acquisition process.

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  • 18:10 CEST Thanks and Closing Greetings

Organizer

Yannis Haralambous, IMT Atlantique & CNRS Lab-STICC, Brest, France

Location

The conference will be held online. Registered participants will receive connection parameters and password.

Important dates

Submission deadline (extended): January 20, 2020
Notification of acceptance: April 5th, 2020
Conference: June 17-19, 2020 (online)
Submission of paper for Proceedings: September 15th, 2020
For more information on the conference please visit 

https://grafematik2020.sciencesconf.org
and follow
https://twitter.com/grafematik2020

Registration Fee

Due to COVID-19 pandemics the conference will be held online. The amount of the (strongly reduced due to the conditions) registration fee is of 20€. Payment can be done via credit card or bank transfer. Please go through the registration process in order to register.

Proceedings

The Proceedings will be published by Fluxus Editions publishing house (Brest, France) as a volume of the Grapholinguistics and Its Applications Series. Articles in the Proceedings can be 12-40 pages long (LaTeX article style) and can be written in English, French or German. Instructions can be found here. The submission deadline is September 15th, 2020.

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