Language Structure and Optimal Orthography

When we study the spoken languages of the world-and there are by now many hundreds of reliable descriptions available-we are always impressed by the fact that all these languages are, to echo a phrase of Greenberg (1963): "cut from a common pattern [p. 255]. '' No doubt a large part of this common pattern can be explained by reference to the properties of the human organs that produce or perceive these sounds. In particular, many of the phonetic universals that have been extracted from numerous studies are clearly due to the mechanical limitations of the mouth-its range and rate of movement. In contrast to spoken language, the written languages of the world exhibit more major differences. Inasmuch as their development (and probably their emergence as well) is largely based on speech, the scripts are all correlated with the preexisting units of the spoken language. But the exact nature of this correlation varies across languages.