There is general agreement on the main features of the process through which the phonology of modern standard Chinese has evolved over three millennia from that of Old Chinese. However, according to general linguistic theory, that phonological history is impossible: the theory claims that no human language can evolve in the manner in which Chinese is believed to have evolved. Furthermore, this particular strand of general linguistic theory has recently been corroborated through stringent statistical testing. Thus there is a glaring contradiction between two areas of scholarship, and to date there has been little recognition by the scholarly community of the need to resolve this contradiction, indeed little willingness to admit its existence. I argue that the contradiction is real and serious, and needs resolution.

Whether spelling is phonemic is only one factor in whether a writing system is suitable for a given language; another consideration is "lexical distinctiveness" of spelling, in two separate senses, and the importance of lexical distinctiveness grows as a writing system matures. Seen in this light, the increasing irregularity of English spelling, over the period when English has been a written language, has been a desirable response to the changing needs of the English-speaking world.

The redundancy of self-organization as an explanation of English spelling Geoffrey Sampson Kristian Berg and Mark Aronoff (2017; henceforth B&A) use historical data on the spellings of various English suffixes to argue for the role of 'self-organization' as a process by which system emerges spontaneously in an unregulated linguistic domain. They argue that choices of spelling for given phonological suffixes gradually settled down in such a way that spellings became indicators of part of speech. This is an attractive idea, but B&A's data fail to support it, because they do not adequately consider the availability of other explanations. Data cannot constitute evidence for a novel theory, if they are already convincingly accounted for independently of that theory. This, I believe, applies to most if not all spellings cited by B&A. Many are explainable in terms of phonological detail, or of the nature of education during the relevant period; some have more specialized explanations. B&A discuss four cases: the suffixes -ous, -ic, -al, and -y, together (in each of the four cases) with suffixes that are phonologically similar but spelled differently. To keep the length of this commentary within bounds, I do not deal exhaustively with every example word cited by B&A. I begin by showing that for their first case, -ous, all of their data are convincingly accounted for by explanations independent of 'self-organization'. Then from B&A's three other cases I pick out examples that introduce considerations different in kind from those already discussed. I do not claim to be able to 'explain away' every last one of B&A's data. But that is to be expected, considering that I do not have (and perhaps no one has) an ideally complete knowledge of the evolution of English spelling and English pronunciation (particularly the pronunciation of vowels in unstressed syllables). However, the proportion of B&A's examples not accounted for by any of the principles I discuss is not large enough, I believe, to leave the case for self-organization persuasive. B&A introduce the -ous case by displaying a table (their Table 2, p. 45) that lists alternative graphic patterns for words that they regard as sharing a common phonological suffix,1 which they transcribe as /ɨs/. (1) as in hazardous, nervous bonus, genius glottis, tennis hostess, princess office, service B&A note (p. 41) that the CELEX database used for their research makes a phonetic distinction between [ǝs] as in nervous and [ɪs] as in office, but they see that as not relevant because '[t]his distinction is not justified phonetically in many varieties of English'; they suggest, citing Flemming and Johnson (2007), that in American English the distinction only occurs in the special case of pairs like Rosa's, roses. However, what matters for B&A's argument is not the phonology of any present-day English dialect, but that of the language during the period when spelling conventions were still evolving. [End Page e43] (For -ous and all but one of the other phonological suffixes discussed by B&A, the endpoint of the period they consider is 1710.) One cannot assume that this resembled present-day American English in the relevant respect, considering that in standard British Received Pronunciation (RP) the five graphic patterns listed above correspond to at least three different phonological patterns. A. C. Gimson (1967) gives hazardous, nervous, bonus, and genius with /ǝs/; glottis, tennis, office, and service with /is/; princess with /es/ (thus not wholly unstressed); and hostess with /is/ but /es/ as a 'less frequent' variant. Failure to distinguish the reduced vowels of tennis and office from those of hazardous and nervous is unusual in Britain, as demonstrated by the fact that it is a striking feature of the speech of Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007, which otherwise conforms to RP norms.2 B&A's decision to ignore the contrast between [ǝs] and [ɪs] would be justified if American English reflected the original position in this case and RP usage were innovative. For some of the obvious phonological differences between the two dialects, that is so, but here the truth...

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For the study of writing systems (still verymuch aminority branch of linguistics) the whole concept of typology is controversial, because there are influential scholars who believe that all the world’s scripts are essentially of the same type. There has been a long though not particularly honourable tradition of discussing all writing systems as if they were more successful or less successful attempts to approximate the Roman alphabet, seen as the only possible ideal from which any other kind of script could only be viewed as a falling-off. In 1960, for instance, the distinguished anthropologist Sir Jack Goody and the literary critic Ian Watt co-authored a widelyread paper (Goody&Watt 1963) which used the term “literate societies” explicitly to mean societies using an alphabetic script, as opposed to societies like China which for over three millennia has (as Goody and Watt saw it) been struggling with a system of writing too crude to confer the benefits of literacy on the society which uses it. Michael & Jennifer Cole (2006: 305) note that Goody and Watt’s paper, and subsequent related writings of Goody’s, “have had an especially influential and continuing impact on a wide range of different disciplines [...] Goody’s work on this topic continues to be used by anthropologists and historians, psychologists and sociologists”. Scholars within the tradition described have often been prepared to recognize a difference in type between alphabetic scripts (the elements of which stand for segmental phonemes) and syllabic scripts (which divide speech into whole syllables). But this is a relatively minor distinction, set against the contrast between logographic scripts, which assign distinct marks to meaningful units of a language, i.e., words or morphemes, and phonographic scripts which represent phonological units of one size or another. And even the syllabic v. alphabetic distinction was often blurred, for instance by lumping together, as “syllabic”,

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The number of possible distinct names of reasonable length is necessarily finite, and with the heavy demand for new names in some areas of current English-speaking commerce it seems possible that the supply might approach exhaustion. Numbers of possibilities cannot be calculated exactly, because most wordforms theoretically allowed by English phonology are too clumsy to be usable. However, Monte Carlo methods permit estimates of numbers of names which are plausible by present-day standards. These estimates suggest that the prospect of running out of names may not be merely fanciful.

Reply to the Comments Geoffrey Sampson I am very grateful to the commentators for their responses to my paper. These are thoughtful, interesting, and diverse. I can only hope that the following amounts to a worthy reply. More than one commentator takes up my point that there would be no paradox, if the move from monomorphemic to bimorphemic vocabulary had preceded the loss of phonological contrasts. I gave reasons to believe that it could hardly have happened that way, but Wang Feng offers some fascinating statistical material which is quite new to me. (I am ashamed to say that I know little of the research literature being published within China.) According to Wang Feng, the sound-changes which have made Mandarin phonological structure so much simpler than that of Old Chinese were concentrated within two periods of just a few centuries each; and his Figure 1 shows that the propensity of Chinese to use compound words, though it has risen more or less continuously since the earliest written documents, rose particularly fast also over two short periods. These data, Wang Feng says, make it likely “that an increase of multisyllabic words in Chinese preceded phonological simplification”. That conclusion could follow only indirectly, I presume. Many [End Page 740] new compounds will have been coined to express new concepts; what is relevant to our topic (as Matthew Chen points out) is only those cases where a compound came into use to replace a monosyllable previously used for the same concept. But filtering out such cases from the entire vocabulary would take a large-scale research effort, and I accept that the raw figures for all compounds may well give us a hint at how relevant usage might have evolved. Even so, it is not clear to me that Wang Feng’s specific data support his conclusion. According to these data, the periods of phonological simplification were 200 BC to AD 200, and AD 800–1000.1 Figure 1 places the first jump in polysyllabic vocabulary at 300–200 BC and the second at AD 1200–1300.2 In the earlier case, the period of vocabulary change does precede that of phonological simplification (or at least, in view of note 2, overlaps with it); but in the second case the vocabulary development apparently falls centuries later than the phonological simplification. So we have at best a score draw, it seems. Wolfgang Behr argues that the beginnings of the shift to polymorphemic vocabulary are visible in the records very early, in the Spring and Autumn period (roughly 700–500 BC) or even earlier. Clearly, the earlier that shift got under way, the more plausible it becomes that the repeated losses of phonological contrasts did not in practice create much homophony when they occurred. But the examples Behr offers of early polysyllables mostly appear to be very special cases. Onomatopoeic terms are surely irrelevant: an onomatopoeic polysyllable, like English ding-dong or ho-ho, is hardly a “compound” of separate “morphemes”. And obscure proper names are just obscure – do we know that the Shang dynasty dignitaries mentioned by Behr were even Han native speakers? I do not dispute that there may have been some early compound words which fell outside these categories. However (to repeat) the issue is not that Chinese came to use many compounds, but that even concepts previously expressed by single morphemes came in many or most cases to be expressed by compounds, often compounds of synonyms. Estimates of the incidence of compound words in early Chinese are necessarily based on written sources. Matthew Chen draws attention to the undoubted fact that the written form of a language is not a perfect guide to usage in casual speech at the same period, suggesting that speech in the Classical period may have been much more polymorphemic than [End Page 741] one would guess from the Classical texts. It is recognized by all that the Literary Chinese of recent centuries preserved a style that was long obsolete in speech, but I can hardly believe that the writing of the Classical period was a kind of telegraphese abbreviation of a spoken language with a vocabulary more like present-day . Consider the (“Book of Odes...

Recent cross-language research has yielded strong statistical evidence in support of the idea, advocated by André Martinet and widely accepted by linguists, that languages avoid adopting sound-changes which would create many homophones. Yet we know that the history of Chinese phonology has been marked by repeated phoneme mergers and losses which led to a very high incidence of homophony, forcing the monomorphemic vocabulary of the classical language to be replaced by a largely bimorphemic modern vocabulary. This paper examines various ways in which this apparent contradiction might be resolved. None seems fully satisfactory, yet some resolution must exist.

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This ‘short shot’ article draws attention to an unresolved contradiction between fundamental assumptions of modern linguistics and economics. Endogenous growth theory has become the consensus explanation of the phenomenon of long-term economic growth. This theory makes an assumption that is not seen as controversial by economists, namely, that the supply of new, unanticipated ideas is limited only by the level of resources committed to idea generation. Much linguistic theorizing, by contrast, assumes that potential human cognitive products are tightly constrained by biology. Although linguists and economists are primarily interested in different kinds of ‘ideas’, there is a real contradiction between the respective assumptions. The article does not offer a resolution of the contradiction, but encourages members of our discipline to be aware of it as a problem needing to be resolved.*

Two kinds of objection are made to the claim that some languages are simpler than others. Many linguists have asserted that, as a matter of empirical observation, all languages are roughly equal in complexity, but very little evidence has been cited. A more weighty objection is that the claim is meaningless because the complexity of different languages is incommensurable. It may not be numerically quantifiable; but a comparison with the evolution of legal systems shows that that does not make claims of differential complexity meaningless.

Anyone who urges that differences between languages may correlate with differences in societies' perceptions of the world is open to misunderstanding by those who do not recognise the arbitrariness of their own socially-conditioned perceptions. A striking example is the reception of William Gladstone's nineteenth-century analyses of the vocabulary of the Homeric epics, Europe's first literature. Gladstone anticipated themes that are commonly seen as original advances of twentieth-century anthropology and linguistics; but this achievement has been obscured by a longstanding misinterpretation, according to which Gladstone ascribed Homer's surprising use of colour words to colour-blindness. At present, that misinterpretation is being disseminated more widely than ever before. In fact, Gladstone explicitly did not believe that Ancient Greeks were colour-blind. He did express a range of ideas standardly credited to much more recent scholarship. The reception of Gladstone's Homeric writings demonstrates the strength of the human disposition to trivialize significant cultural differences.