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Article In: Writing/Reading Interface
Edited by Terry Joyce and Constanze Weth
[Written Language & Literacy 28:1] 2025
► pp. 44–84

Heterophonic homography in African and Semitic languages

Comparing the functions of tones and vowels

 | Independent researcher
 | Tel Aviv University
 | Bar-Ilan University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Bird (Bird, Steven%. (1999a). Strategies for representing tone in African writing systems. Written Language and Literacy 2:1.1–44. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . (1999b). When marking tone reduces fluency: An orthography experiment in Cameroon. Language and Speech 421.83–115. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) was one of the first linguists to draw attention to the similarities between the newly emerging Roman script orthographies of African languages, where tone is often under-represented, and Semitic orthographies, where most vowels are typically under-represented. This paper demonstrates that it is not only the orthographies but the linguistic functions of tone in African languages and vowels in both Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic that are similar; not just at a general level but also in their details. In seeking to illustrate the similarities between a wide range of African languages and the two Semitic language, the paper catalogues pairs of heterophonic homographs as being either lexical (Section 3.1) or grammatical (Section 3.2) in nature, as well as cases of interaction (Section 3.3). The paper also acknowledges a number of lexical tone distinctions among African languages that have no parallels in the vowel structures of Hebrew and Arabic (Section 4). Given the striking similarities in how the linguistic functions of African tone and Semitic vowels are represented (or not) in the different writing systems, any researchers concerned with developing orthographies for previously unwritten tone languages, such as those in Africa, would do well to heed the extensive literature on Hebrew and Arabic literacy acquisition and to identify what lessons can be extracted when developing tone orthographies.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Aims and motivation
    • 1.2Diacritics in African and Semitic orthographies
    • 1.3Parallels between African and Semitic languages
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Data collection
    • 2.2Data presentation and transcription
  • 3.Similarities between heterophonic homography in African and Semitic languages
    • 3.1Lexical pairs
      • 3.1.1Same-category pairs
      • 3.1.2Cross-category pairs
    • 3.2Grammatical pairs
      • 3.2.1Person
      • 3.2.2Number
      • 3.2.3Gender
      • 3.2.4Determiners
      • 3.2.5Adpositions
      • 3.2.6Voice
      • 3.2.7Transitivity
      • 3.2.8TAM categories
      • 3.2.9Derivations
        • 3.2.9.1Nominalisations
        • 3.2.9.2Agentives
        • 3.2.9.3Causatives
        • 3.2.9.4Intensives
        • 3.2.9.5Inchoatives
        • 3.2.9.6Gerunds
    • 3.3Interactions between lexical and grammatical functions
  • 4.Dissimilarities between African and Semitic heterophonic homography
    • 4.1Case
    • 4.2Demonstratives
    • 4.3Negation
    • 4.4Focus
    • 4.5Relative clauses
    • 4.6Copula verb phrases vs genitive noun phrases
    • 4.7Predicate nominals
    • 4.8Derivations
      • 4.8.1Singulatives
      • 4.8.2Augmentatives
      • 4.8.3Prepositions
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Author queries
  • References
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