Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese By Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor (review)

376LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) and nonperipheral. These classes define themselves in English dialects by their differential behavior in ongoing processes of sound change. The peripheral vowels in general rise while the nonperipheral ones fall. In addition, for American English, at least, the peripheral vowels have all developed colored off-glides (the source of the infamous IyI and /w/ glides in the TragerSmith transcription), while the nonperipheral ones have in general developed colorless s-offglides : 'bead' [biid] vs. 'bid' [bisd], for example. Similarly, in Quebec French the high vowels [i,y,u] have developed lax counterparts [i, y, u] in closed syllables, and a process of lax harmony spreads the lax feature leftwards across the rest of the word: abusif [abY'zif] 'abusive', inutile [my'tsil] 'useless'. The close relationship between vowels that appear to be adjacent in height 'within a zone' (much as we find between related members of the major articulatory zones) suggests that there is a single feature controlling this relationship, and tense/lax still seems the best available suggestion, despite the unease of the phonetics community. With the exception ofthe issue oftenseness, I am unable to present a single significant criticism ofthis book. On the back ofthe paperback edition John Goldsmith, Michael Kenstowicz, William Hardcastle, and W. Barry are all quoted praising this book as something that needs to be on everyone's bookshelf. I can only endorse the nomination. REFERENCES Halle, Morris. 1983. On distinctive features and their articulatory implementation. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1.91-105. Hurch, Bernhard. 1988. Über aspiration: Ein Kapitel aus der natürlichen Phonologie. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1: Internal factors. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell . Lindblom, Björn, and Ian Maddieson. 1988. Phonetic universale in consonant systems. Language, speech and mind: Studies in honor of Victoria A. Fromkin, ed. by Larry Hyman and Charles Li, 62-80. London and New York: Routledge. McCarthy, John. 1988. Feature geometry and depency: A review. Phonetica 45:84-108. Nathan, Geoffrey S. 1989. Preliminaries to a theory of phonological substance: The substance of sonority. Linguistic categorization, ed. by Roberta Corrigan, Fred Eckman, and Michael Noonan, 55-67. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. -----. 1995. How the phoneme inventory gets its shape—cognitive grammar' s view of phonological systems. Rivista di Lingüistica 6.275-88. Sagey, Elizabeth. 1990. The representation of features in non-linear phonology: The articulator node hierarchy . New York: Garland. Stevens, Kenneth. 1989. On the quantal nature of speech. Journal of Phonetics 17.3-46. ----- and Samuel Jay Keyser. 1989. Primary features and their enhancement in consonants. Language 65.81-106. Department of Linguistics Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL 62901-4517 [geoffn@siu.edu] Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese. By Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995. Pp. 412. $68.00. Reviewed by Mary S. Erbaugh, City University of Hong Kong Chinese characters are called hanzi in China, kanji in Japan, and hancha in Korea. About twothirds of characters contain phonetic elements which Chinese speakers find accessible enough to read and write exclusively in characters. Non-Chinese-speakers, Koreans, and Japanese who borrowed the classical Chinese script a millennium ago have developed highly efficient syllabaries to supplement the characters, which are still used for a decreasing number of culturally REVIEWS377 important content words as well as many proper names. Insup Taylor, Korean-born and also fluent in Japanese, enlisted M. Martin Taylor in taking on two huge, rich topics: the psycholinguistics of reading characters in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean; and the historical sociolinguistics ofliteracy in those languages. No other work compares to this in depth, scope, or in the richness of its primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English. The authors argue strongly for the efficiency of characters . Characters, they say, should be strengthened and retained, not only in China but in Korea and Japan as well, especially if they are systematically selected and 'streamlined'. I. Taylor is a member of the Comparative Literacy Project in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology , but the book refutes McLuhan's 1962 statement, 'Cultures can rise far above civilization artistically, but without the phonetic alphabet they remain...