Xin Tang 6 - Pinyin.info

2HOMOGRAPHOB I AJOHN DEFRANCISHOMOGRAPHOBIA is a disorder characterized by anIrrational fear of ambiguity when Individual lexical items which arenow distinguished graphically lose their distinctive features andbecome identical if written phonemically. The seriousness of thedisorder appears to be In direct proportion to the increase Innumber of items with identical spe11tng that phonemic renderingmight bring about. The aberration may not exist at all amongpeople favored by writing systems that are already closelyphonemic, such as Spanish and German. It exists to a mild degreeamong readers of a poorly phonemic (actually morphophonemic)writing system such as English, some of whom suffer anxietyreactions at the thought of the confusion that· might arise if, forexample, rain, rmn, and mgD were all written as ~. It exists inits most virulent form among those exposed to Chinese characters,which, among all the writing systems ever created, are unique intheir ability to convey meaning under extreme conditions ofisolation.That the fear is a genuine phobia, that is an irrational fe8r, isattested to by the fact that it is confined only to those cases inwhich lexical items that are DQJ( distinguished in writing would losetheir distinctiveness if written phonemically, as in the case ofthe three English homophones mentioned above. Quite irrationally,the fear is not provoked by lexical items which ore not nowdistinguished in writing, even though the 8mount of alreadyJohn OeFrancis shi Xiaweiyi Daxued rongyu YUYllnxue jilloshou.- ----------_._-----------