Heterophonic homography in African and Semitic languages

Abstract Bird ( 1999a , 1999b ) 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 languages, 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.