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Linguistische
Arbeiten 460
Herausgegeben von Hans Altmann, Peter Blumenthal,
Hans Jürgen Heringer, Ingo Plag, Heinz Vater und Richard Wiese

The Relation of Writing
to Spoken Language
Edited by
Martin Neef, Anneke Neijt and Richard Sproat
Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen 2002

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
The relation of writing to spoken language / ed. by Martin Neef.... - Tübingen : Niemeyer, 2002
(Linguistische Arbeiten; 460)
ISBN 3-484-30460-X ISSN 0344-6727
© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2002
Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der
engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das
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Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany.
Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier.
Druck: Weihert-Druck GmbH, Darmstadt
Einband: Industriebuchbinderei Nädele, Nehren

Table of Contents
Martin Neef, Anneke Neijt, and Richard Sproat
Introduction 1
Section 1: Consistency
Anneke Neijt
The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 11
Richard Sproat
The Consistency of the Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch 35
Section 2: Cross-Linguistic Studies
Susanne R. Borgwaldt & Annette M.B. de Groot
Beyond the Rime: Measuring the Consistency of Monosyllabic and Polysyllabic Words... 49
Dorit Ravid & Steven Gillis
Teachers' Perception of Spelling Patterns and Children's Spelling Errors:
A Cross-Linguistic Perspective 71
Section 3: Diacritics and Punctuation
Vincent J. van Heuven
Effects of Diaeresis on Visual Word Recognition in Dutch 99
Jochen Geilfuß-Wolfgang
Optimal Hyphenation 115
Ursula Bredel
The Dash in German 131

VI Table of Contents
Section 4: Sharpening in German
Christina Noack
Regularities in German Orthography:
A Computer-Based Comparison of Different Approaches to Sharpening 149
Martin Neef
The Reader's View: Sharpening in German 169
Thomas Lindauer
How Syllable Structure affects Spelling: A Case Study in Swiss German Syllabification... 193
Addresses of Contributors 209

Martin Neef, Ameke Neijt, and Richard Sproat
Introduction
This collection of papers grew out of the workshop Writing Language, held at the Max Planck
Institute Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on August 28-30, 2000. The purpose of the workshop
was to bring together researchers of diverse backgrounds who share a common goal of
achieving a better understanding of the role of writing in language behavior. The international
grounding of this workshop is reflected by the present volume which includes articles written
by researchers working in six different countries (Belgium, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands,
Switzerland, and the USA) and analyzing four different writing systems (Dutch, English,
German, and Hebrew).
The papers selected for the current volume represent several lines of research into the intri-
cate relation between writing and spoken language: Theoretical and computational linguists
discuss the models that explain why orthographies are the way they are and the constraints
that hold between writing and speaking a language; researchers in the area of special educa-
tion deal with the question how certain aspects of orthography can be learned; and psycho-
linguists discuss aspects of language processing affected by variation in orthographies.
Among the theoretical papers, there is one pursuing a functional perspective on language,
while the others adhere to the formal paradigm, supporting either a derivational or a non-deri-
vational theory. By offering a forum of discussion to researchers in all these fields, we hope to
stimulate research that takes all aspects of the written mode into account in order to gain a
better understanding of the relation between writing and the spoken language.
Several important general questions are raised by the papers to follow and we would like to
review some of them briefly here.
Orthography and writing system
The terms orthography and writing system are used as near synonyms in this book. Both
terms refer to the way a language is written. When a difference is intended, it will be that an
orthography is the standardized set of spellings. These spellings may follow from the applica-
tion of a conventional set of rules for writing a given language, or they may be singular cases
that are principally independent from such a rule system. A writing system, however, includes
the regularities underlying the writing behavior of competent writers which may in principle
differ fundamentally from the conventional rule formulations. Most of the contributions to
this volume deal with the standard spelling system, or with aspects of writing that are not
explicitly standardized, in which case the more precise difference between orthography and
writing system is irrelevant.
How natural is writing?
Given a modular approach to linguistic structure, one may assume that writing is a module of
the grammar, with an interface level that defines the relation between the written and the spo-

2 Martin Neef, Anneke Neijt, and Richard Sproat
ken variant of a language. Then, the relation between, e.g., orthography and phonology could
be in essence comparable to the relation between phonology and syntax, and the issues dis-
cussed could be similar. Also, one may then consider writing, even though it is an artefact, to
be a natural system, obeying the constraints that hold universally for the architecture of
human languages.
Alternatively, writing and speaking might be considered parallel routes of processing,
without a clear interface, but instead with writing being parasitic on speaking. In that case,
there is no single level functioning as the interface between the oral and written modes. Given
the latter point of view, one could of course also take the surface level of a language as the
interface, given the assumption that language users derive all extra information to be encoded
in the written mode from their knowledge of the language. And vice versa: that readers take
the written form to be directly related to the language's surface structure and that extra
knowledge needed to understand the written code derives from their knowledge of the lan-
guage. In either case, the conclusion will be that writing is not related to the language system
as if it were a natural component of the grammar.
Deep and shallow orthographies
One of the classic issues in orthographic research is the notion of orthographic depth. This
notion is based on the ordering between the modules of the grammar, taking morphology to
be 'deeper' than phonology. Within the modules, orthographic depth is based on rule order-
ing, classifying writing systems that encode abstract, more phonemic information as being
deeper than writing systems that encode concrete, more phonetic representations. In modern
models of phonology, rule ordering has been deprecated, but orthographic depth may still be a
valuable notion: data do not change just because theories change, a point that is often lost in
the rush to adopt new theories. The term depth, it seems, turns out to be a descriptive notion
that is in need of a theoretical foundation and re-interpretation in actual constraint-based
models of grammar.
What is the relation between orthography and the processes of writing and reading?
Theoretical linguistics aims at specifying the interrelations of the elements constituting a lin-
guistic system, or, with regard to language users, at identifying the knowledge structures lan-
guage users have to have in order to be competent. Psycholinguistics, on the other hand, deals
with the question how these knowledge structures are put to use, either in production or in
reception. It is an important question how these two methodological approaches are con-
nected. Does a convincing answer in one of these fields of linguistics automatically constitute
a substantive answer in the other field, or do we have to be prepared that the findings in these
fields will turn out to be quite independent from each other? This problem is also relevant for
research on written language. In principle, knowledge of the set of rules defining the way a
language is written must be distinguished from the processes involved in applying this knowl-
edge. Theoretical models of writing systems differ in the amount of psycholinguistic findings
concerning reading and writing they are willing to incorporate. On the other hand, psycholin-
guistic research strongly relies on theoretical assumptions with the effect that any new trend
in theoretical linguistics has strong repercussions in psycholinguistics.

Introduction 3
Local, global, and transderivational constraints
Reflections on different kinds of constraints are suitable to further illustrate this point. Pro-
cessing feasibility is one of the general constraints on language systems, and locality con-
ditions function as baseline conditions on processing. The idea is that systems where language
users need to collect information from non-local domains take too much time and effort to
use, and thus cannot be psychologically real. Do such considerations apply to spelling sys-
tems as well? Recall that global constraints are constraints that refer to an earlier or later stage
in the derivation. Their use led, for instance, to the introduction in syntactic theory of traces to
mark the position of a moved constituent. Transderivational constraints are non-local con-
straints of another kind, in that they refer not only to the current derivation, but also to other,
related derivations. The criticisms of non-local constraints are valid for speaking, less clearly
so for writing: for example, writers may depend upon explicit instructions or conscious strate-
gies for making the correct choice between a pair of differently spelled homophones. Writers
may consciously reflect on the spelling variant needed in such cases, e.g. in choosing between
the English verbs affect and effect, between dass and das in German, and between word and
wordt in Dutch. One strategy for the English case, for example, is to remember that effect
means 'to bring about'; so if one merely means 'to influence in some way', one probably
wants affect. Such considerations seem to be non-locaL, since in such cases the writer seems to
be invoking alternative scenarios.
So, writers consciously decide on spellings of homophones, and spelling instruction
includes warnings for the writer about homophones. Furthermore, in cases of uncertainty,
writers may decide to change their wording so as to avoid a potentially embarrassing mistake.
However, one should not be led to the conclusion that non-local language behavior is
restricted to spelling and homophony: writers also labor over matters of lexical choice (in this
particular situation what is the mot juste ...), phrasing, morphological form (should I write
octopuses or octopi), and whether, for example, a conditional is the right way to express a
particular point. Even when speaking, people often think carefully about what they are saying:
consider the situation where you are about to complain about something to someone and you
are deciding exactly how to say it, e.g. which words and tone of voice to use, so that they
won't get offended. Language use may thus include non-local processing, under special cir-
cumstances. Non-local language behavior is certainly not restricted to issues of spelling.
In speaking, however, indications of non-local behavior in language use has not led to the
assumption that non-local constraints are available for the lexicon, morphology, syntax, and
semantics. Rather, one of the basic assumptions has been that language systems are con-
strained by severe locality conditions, excluding global and transderivational constraints from
the description of language. Similar considerations may be taken as point of departure for
spelling research, but the facts that writing language is a more conscious process and learning
to write requires explicit instructions may give us some indication that writing systems are
essentially different from natural language, and that these may exhibit non-locality, such as
global or transderivational constraints.
The dependency hypothesis versus the autonomy hypothesis
Theories of orthography usually follow a conception that seeks to derive written forms from
spoken forms. This is most obvious for the relation between sounds and letters. The sounds

4 Martin Neef, Anneke Neijt, and Richard Sproat
represented in phonological structures are taken as the primary elements on which the respec-
tive letters are dependent. Under this view, the English word beat has the initial letter 
because the underlying spoken form [bi:t] begins with the sound [b]. However convincing this
approach is on first sight, there are several aspects of written forms that cannot be explained
straightforwardly in this way. For example, there are letters that have no basis in the pronun-
ciation, as in the case of the mute <h> in German, and there are sounds that have no reflection
in the spelling, as in the case of short vowels in unvocalized Semitic writing systems. The use
of graphotactic constraints in Dutch further illustrates autonomy: there is no phonological
difference between <a> and <aa> in manen 'moons' and maan 'moon', and the difference can
be described with rules that refer to the string of letters only. It will be an issue of future
research to decide on the balance between the dependency hypothesis that highlights aspects
of spellings that have a clear base in the spoken forms or the autonomy hypothesis which
focuses on those elements of spellings that seem to have a status independent from the spoken
forms. When both kinds of rules are needed for a proper understanding of writing systems,
three sets of information about a given writing system are implied: Well-formedness con-
straints on the output (the strings of letters, the use of spaces, punctuation, and perhaps lay-
out); rules governing the relation between the spoken language and its written output; and
rules governing the opposite relation, between writing and spoken language.
Readability versus writability
This theoretical dichotomy can be subsumed under a more general view on orthography:
What is the balance between reading and writing in orthography? At the design phase of a
writing system, the need to express what can be spoken is present, but in the case of spelling
reforms, the needs of the readers may become more important. This may explain why spaces
in between words were invented relatively late. Perhaps also the general tendency of spelling
systems to develop from more phonologically based to more morphologically based can be
explained this way. Approaches to explain orthographies predominantly stem from the per-
spective of the writer. This is understandable given that learning to write is much more diffi-
cult than learning to read. Hence, the didactics of orthography are the didactics of writing.
Efforts to reform a specific orthography also predominantly stem from the perspective of the
writer. This may be because lecturers in teaching methods have been given the main respon-
sibility of spelling reforms. But it may lead in a wrong direction, if it turns out that the main
function of a writing system is not to make writing as easy as possible but to make reading as
effective as possible. Thus, the question of readability may be one of the central aspects of
future research on writing systems.
The contributions in this volume
The contributions to this volume all deal with one or more of the tenuous questions posed
above. The first section is devoted to the discussion of a theoretical conception introduced by
Sproat (2000), the Consistency Hypothesis. Embedded in a derivational conception of gram-
mar, this approach makes the substantive claim that for each language there is one fixed point
in the grammatical derivation where the derivation of the writing system of that language
branches off. Sproat terms this point in the derivation the Orthographically Relevant Level.
As a consequence, the effects of some linguistic rules should be consistently mirrored in the

Introduction 5
respective written forms while the effects of other rules should consistently not be visible in
the written forms. In her paper The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar, Anneke Neijt chal-
lenges the Consistency Hypothesis. On the basis of Dutch, she claims that only the first step
in the translation of sounds into letters can be restricted to one consistent level. For the gra-
photactic rules defining the well-formedness of strings of letters and for other aspects of
written forms, more than this single level is necessary in defining the relation between
speaking and writing. Among these other aspects is punctuation that is in need of global
information from morphology, syntax, and semantics. Furthermore, morphological informa-
tion has to be invoked. Classes of morphemes may form exceptions to an otherwise consistent
spelling system, with depth in terms of their derivations having no bearing on the issue.
In The Consistency of the Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch, Richard Sproat care-
fully examines the data presented by Neijt and concludes, that given certain assumptions
about rule formulations, a specific phonological level (a level somewhere in between pho-
nemes and phones) can be taken as the input of the writing system for a language such as
Dutch. Sproat supplies an explicit analysis of a fragment of Dutch phonology that gives a
clear localization of the Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch, dealing with questions
like stress, final devoicing, and different rules for native vs. non-native morphemes. In his
conclusion, Sproat reflects on the naturalness of the Consistency Hypothesis.
The second section presents cross-linguistic studies. Susanne Borgwaldt and Annette de
Groot base their paper Beyond the Rime: Measuring the Consistency of Monosyllabic and
Polysyllabic Words on a close inspection of the writing systems of Dutch, English, and Ger-
man. Their focus is the notion of consistency in a psycholinguistic tradition. Usually, research
on phonological consistency focuses on monosyllabic words, which are split up into onset and
rime. Subsequently, the mappings between written and spoken rimes are compared. Words
sharing the same written rime are then considered feedforward consistent if the corresponding
spoken rimes are pronounced in the same way. Words sharing the same spoken rime are
called feedback consistent if their rimes are written in the same way. Borgwaldt and de Groot
offer a method for determining the degree of bidirectional consistency that is applicable for
monosyllabic and polysyllabic data alike. It is shown that by taking not only the consistency
mappings between rimes into account but also those between other (overlapping) subsyllabic
units, the accuracy of the description of consistency increases considerably.
In Teachers' Perception of Spelling Patterns and Children's Spelling Errors: A Cross-Lin-
guistic Perspective, Dorit Ravid and Steven Gillis illustrate that the complexity of orthog-
raphies as different as Hebrew and Dutch must be valued from different perspectives. They
examine the teachers' perception of morphologically-mediated spelling patterns, compared
with children's actual spelling performance on items spelled according to these same patterns.
The study focuses on teachers' explicit knowledge of the role of morphological and morpho-
phonological cues in spelling homophonous graphemes in Hebrew and Dutch, with alternative
spellings for the same sound. In general, Ravid and Gillis find that teachers' metalinguistic
knowledge of spelling patterns is a mirror image of children's performance. The authors
explain their findings in terms of consciousness: explicit metalinguistic formulation of spell-
ing patterns operates differently than natural information processing in language use.
Section 3 deals with elements of writing systems different from mere letters. One kind of
such elements are diacritics that modify the content of letters. A specific type of diacritics is

6 Martin Neef, Anneke Neijt, and Richard Sproat
the topic of Effects of Diaeresis on Visual Word Recognition in Dutch by Vincent van Heu-
ven. Usually, efforts of the writer make the reading process easier. For instance: when writers
bother to signal nouns with capital letters (as in German), the reading process will be facili-
tated. This is not what has been found by Van Heuven for the use of diaereses in Dutch. Such
diaereses signal orthographic syllable boundaries and sometimes prevent homography. In a
lexical decision task manipulating words with and without diaereses and with a transposed
diaeresis, however, reaction times were not faster, nor was the accuracy of lexical decision
different. This shows that not all information on the pronunciation of words need to be
encoded in the written form. A certain amount of abstractness will lead to a system which is
more efficient for the writer and nonetheless equally efficient for the reader.
Punctuation marks have a less clear foundation in spoken language than letters. The theo-
retical debate revolves around the question to what amount their distribution can nevertheless
be explained with recourse to the phonological structure of linguistic units. Jochen Geilfiiß-
Wolfgang in his article Optimal Hyphenation intends to find supporting evidence for an
autonomous approach to orthography. According to his analysis, hyphenation is sensitive to
orthographic syllables, a notion that is related to, but not identical with, the phonological syl-
lable. Employing the constraint-based Optimality Theory, Geilfuß-Wolfgang formulates some
constraints specific to the orthographic component of grammar. If these constraints are ade-
quately ranked, the account enables the computation of the hyphenation data in German. Geil-
fuß-Wolfgang concludes that orthographic syllables and phonological syllables have many of
the same properties and are governed by many of the same structural constraints.
Other punctuation marks like the comma or the full stop cannot be explained in relation to
word phonology. As Ursula Bredel in The Dash in German shows, analyses that assume a
dependence of written forms on spoken forms argue whether intonation or syntax primarily
guide the distribution of punctuation marks. Since intonation itself is grounded in syntax,
however, these approaches can both be regarded as syntactical in nature. Bredel herself opts
for a different approach that focuses on the characteristics of written language and can, thus,
be subsumed under the autonomy paradigm. In general, she takes punctuation marks as means
for the steering of language processing. Based on a historical reconstruction of the functions
the dash has had in German orthography, Bredel is able to reduce the diverse manners of use
of the dash in contemporary German to one main function, namely to prepare the reader for a
shift of focus.
Section 4, the final section of the book gives different perspectives of one particular note-
worthy phenomenon of the writing system of German, namely sharpening, which is also
known as consonant doubling. The core of this subject can be illustrated by the word Neffe
'nephew': Its pronunciation [nefa] contains only one fricative, but the corresponding letter
appears twice in the written form. Many different approaches have been supported to
explain this complex. Christina Noack compares three different rule systems to sharpening,
spanning a period of more than two hundred years, in her paper Regularities in German
Orthography: A Computer-Based Comparison of Different Approaches to Sharpening. These
rule systems differ in their central focus, which is either the segment or the syllable or the
morpheme. Noack's main concern is to present a computational tool to evaluate the consis-
tency of alternative linguistic analyses on the basis of large corpora. This computer program,
called ORTHO 3.0, enables her to give explicit lists of exceptions that each of the rule sys-

Introduction 7
tems generates. With respect to the number of exceptions, the segment-based approach shows
the worst results, while the other two approaches do not differ significantly.
The approaches compared by Noack all share the dependency perspective in that they
derive the written forms from the spoken forms. Martin Neef in The Reader's View: Sharp-
ening in German offers an alternative analysis within the autonomy paradigm. He follows the
idea that the function of orthography is to give the reader instructions on how to read an
unknown text. The basic tenet of this approach is therefore the Readability Principle, which
demands that spellings should guarantee an unambiguous access to spoken forms. On this
background, Neef re-examines the sharpening-data. His analysis reveals slightly different
exceptions from the derivational theories discussed in Noack's article. Furthermore, Neef
uncovers areas of the vocabulary that show orthographic underspecification, and he defends a
different position on the question in how far sharpening is stress-based.
The final paper of the volume, How Syllable Structure affects Spelling: A Case Study in
Swiss German Syllabification by Thomas Lindauer, takes up the theme of dialectal variation.
It is well-known that language communities are non-homogeneous. This holds especially for
the German speaking societies in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Nevertheless, one
writing system is agreed upon for these non-homogeneous groups of speakers. The question
arises, then, how this writing system can be taught most effectively, given that explicit learn-
ing rules rely on phonological awareness of the learners. Most difficult are, of course, those
rules that refer to phonological information not available for a group of language users
(because a certain distinction is lacking in this variant of German). Lindauer proposes to pre-
sent explicitly different spelling rules for the different communities, nevertheless leading to
the same spelling output. He illustrates his assumptions with the example of sharpening and
the related phonological phenomenon of ambisyllabicity. Since the phonological structures
related with ambisyllabicity are different in Standard German and in Swiss German, the rules
teaching sharpening should be different for these language communities.
Most of the papers presented here grew out of oral presentations at the workshop Writing
Language. Other talks of the same workshop will be published separately in an issue of the
Journal of Written Language and Literacy, edited by Rob Schreuder and Ludo Verhoeven.
The workshop was organized by Harald Baayen, Martin Neef, Anneke Neijt, Rob Schreuder
and Ludo Verhoeven, and sponsored by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk
onderzoek (NWO) and the Center for Language Studies (CLS). We greatly appreciate this
support that helped in producing this book. Finally, we would like to thank Richard Wiese,
the editor of Linguistische Arbeiten, for many helpful comments, and Moritz Neugebauer and
Jessica Schwamb (University of Cologne, German Department) for their help during the final
stages of the preparation of this book.

Section 1: Consistency

Ameke Neijt
The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar
1. Introduction
Spoken language, sign language, and written language - three modes of expression, but one
underlying system? The answer will be negative for sign languages. Studies reveal that sign
languages need not be derived from spoken languages and that if they happen to be derived
from spoken languages, they tend to develop characteristics not present in their spoken origins
(Wilbur 1987, Boyes Braem 1995). For younger generations, sign language can be acquired in
a way that is familiar to how spoken languages are learned. Hence, there is evidence that sign
language forms a system on a par with spoken language and is not dependent on it.
This is not the case for the written mode. Writing seems to be secondary to oral language,
being derived from it, and fundamentally different from sign language. Each new generation
learns the written variety at school after most of the spoken language has been acquired.
Whereas for children the acquisition of a spoken or sign language is an unconscious process,
acquisition of writing requires explicit learning strategies, of which teachers and pupils are
well aware. Writing should be considered another code for the language acquired, which is
why spelling is called secondary. The existence of spelling pronunciations, however, shows
that this secondary mode of expression influences speaking, the primary mode (Van Haerin-
gen 1962, Wells 1982: 106-9, Carney 1994, Maas 2000: 33). Other evidence for this influence
on the primary mode comes from psycholinguistic experiments (cf., for instance, Seidenberg
& Tanenhaus 1979, Schreuder et al. 1998) and from language change (Jespersen 1909). In this
paper, the question how both modes of expression are related is investigated from a theoreti-
cal point of view.
The close relationship between a spoken language and its written variant has led to the
hypothesis that the major part of the system is shared by both modes of expression. For
instance, the semantic component provides the interpretation of scope-bearing elements,
whether written or spoken; the syntactic component provides word order for both. Morphol-
ogy creates words and inflection for both, and even some part of phonology is common, e.g.
phonological segments correlate closely with letters. Some writing systems are called 'deeper'
and others more 'shallow', reflecting the derivational level relevant for writing. Systems
based on morphosyntactic structure are called deeper than systems based on phonological or
phonetic representations (Haas 1976, Sampson 1985, Sgall 1987, Asher & Simpson 1994,
Daniels & Bright 1996, Meisenburg 1996). The claim is that the written mode of expression
follows a route different from the oral mode only in the final stage of processing. In reading, it
is only the first stage of processing that follows a different route, according to this hypothesis.
Speaking and writing thus share a large number of derivational stages, as do hearing and
reading. Schematically:

12 Anneke Neijt
common stages of processing
semantics, syntax, morphology, part of phonology
phonology <--> phonetics phonology orthography
•
speaking / hearing
•
writing / reading
Figure 1: General model of the relation between spoken and written language
This view on how spoken and written language relate to each other has been worked out for
Dutch by Nunn (1998). Dutch orthography is known to be based on a deep phonological stage
of processing, cf. Van Heuven (1978) and Booij (1987). Nunn (1998) adds to this the conclu-
sion that the derivation from phonology to orthography consists of two steps. After the first
step of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion for morphemes, a second step takes care of graph-
eme co-occurrence restrictions by way of graphotactic rules, i.e. grapheme-to-grapheme con-
version rules. Nunn calls such rules 'autonomous spelling rules', claiming that the rules refer
to orthographic information only, although some of the phonological characteristics (the dis-
tinction between consonants and vowels, for instance) are carried over to the orthographical
representation.
Of course, in defending the claim of a derivation in two steps, Nunn emphasizes the differ-
ences between the two steps, i.e. the difference between phonologically and orthographically
based rules. It is from this perspective that Nunn tries to find evidence for the orthographic
nature of autonomous spelling rules and to restrict the amount of phonemic information
necessary for the second step in the derivation from phonology to writing. From this perspec-
tive, it is not surprising that Nunn's analysis of Dutch has been used in Sproat (2000: 16) to
illustrate the Consistency Hypothesis.
(1) Consistency
The Orthographically Relevant Level for a given writing system (as used for a
particular language) represents a consistent level of linguistic representation.
This hypothesis, a direct reflection and strict interpretation of the model sketched in figure 1,
states that there is one consistent Orthographically Relevant Level for a given writing system,
not more than one, cf. figure 2. Notice that 'Consistent' here must not be understood as 'with-
out exceptions'. Where alphabetic writing systems concern the spelling of finite sets of ele-
ments, the opportunity is present to store exceptional orthographic forms in memory. It seems
that exceptions occur in many alphabetic writing systems.

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 13
(deep)
underlying level
ORL
(surface)
Figure 2: The claims of the Consistency Hypothesis: one consistent level by the oral and
written modes
In this paper, evidence will be presented to show that the processes of speaking and writing
share more information than can be provided by a single derivational level. The claim made in
this paper is that the phoneme-to-grapheme conversion rules are based on information from
different levels, as are the grapheme-to-grapheme conversion rules. Of course, the distinction
between the two sets of rules will be valid even when more than just one linguistic level pro-
vides input to the orthographic representation. Therefore, the two-step analysis of Nunn can
be maintained, though defined in a less rigorous fashion. The Consistency Hypothesis, how-
ever, cannot be maintained as a universal principle.
The layout of this paper is as follows. First, the arguments by Nunn (1998) in favor of a
two-step derivation of orthography will be reviewed. Then, in section 3, the Orthographically
Relevant Level according to Nunn will be discussed. It will be shown that the hypothesis that
there is only one such level can be maintained only at the cost of storage. Sections 4 and 5
show that a native Orthographically Relevant Level must be distinguished from a non-native
Orthographically Relevant Level and that punctuation is based on other levels than the pho-
nemic representation of morphemes. Section 6 presents the linguistic information necessary
for the autonomous spelling rules. Section 7 finally summarizes the evidence gathered in the
preceding sections about the linguistic levels needed for writing and presents the overall con-
clusion. Information from different levels of language processing is collected in writing. In
the presentation that follows, most arguments are based on writing and virtually no arguments
are presented about reading.

14 Anneke Neijt
2. An outline of Dutch orthography
Detailed information on the orthography of Dutch can be found in Nunn (1998). She distin-
guishes several orthographic components that are relevant for Dutch. Conversion of native
morphemes needs to be distinguished from conversion of non-native morphemes, and a set of
autonomous rules forms part of the orthographic derivation. Figure 3 is Nunn's analysis in a
nutshell. Observe that she assumes one level with information on the underlying, phonemic,
representations of the segments of morphemes at which all information of the spoken mode is
translated into information on the written mode. Nunn's proposal for Dutch therefore con-
firms Sproat's Consistency Hypothesis. According to Nunn, there is one Orthographically
Relevant Level, the level of morphemes in their phonemic form:
phonemic descriptions of morphemes
1
native conversion non-native conversion
phonological rules autonomous spelling rules
I I
phonetic form orthographic form
Figure 3: Nunn's model of the relation between phonetic and orthographic form
The remainder of this section will present explanatory notes on this model.
Dutch has a so-called deep orthography. Underlying rather than superficial sound segments
are spelled; i.e., morphemes tend to receive a uniform spelling, irrespective of the application
of certain phonological rules that generate sets of allomorphs. Frequently used examples to
illustrate this are hond and heb, with final obstruents spelled in accordance with their under-
lying forms /hand/ and /heb/ instead of their phonetic forms [hont] and [hep]. These under-
lying forms are detectable for the writer on the basis of plural inflection: [hands] and [hete]
with voiced obstruents. Other examples are zuinigheid, aanmelden, hoofddoek 'carefulness, to
announce, head-shawl', for which a more superficial spelling would be *zuinigeit, *aamelde,
*hoofdoek, derived by h-deletion, final devoicing, nasal assimilation, final n-deletion, and
degemination.
Furthermore, Dutch is a language with two sets of words: native ones, such as kunstzin-
nigheid, and non-native ones, such as artisticiteit, both meaning 'artisticity'. The difference
has its origins in the earlier stages at which Dutch imported words from Latin or French, but
new borrowings follow this distinction as well. Non-native words can be distinguished from
native ones on the basis of systematic differences in present-day phonology and morphology
(Van Heuven et al. 1994, Nunn 1998: 155 flf.). One of the most important characteristics is the

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 15
number of full vowels present in morphemes: when more than one full vowel is present, the
morpheme will be non-native. Exceptions to this rule are only a handful of frozen compounds
such as aardbei 'strawberry' which behave as native words, notwithstanding the presence of
more than one full vowel.
The distinction between native and non-native morphemes takes the native morphemes as
point of departure, such that all morphemes not in accordance with the constraints that hold
for native morphemes are non-native. Therefore, the fact that only one full vowel is present in
a morpheme is a necessary but not a sufficient criterion for this morpheme being a native
morpheme. Further constraints are the combination of consonant clusters (for instance, only a
limited set of clusters occurs in native morphemes, not the clusters /sk/, /stf, and /tm/, which
predicts that skelet 'skeleton', sfeer 'sphere', and ritme 'rhythm' are non-native words, even
though only one full vowel occurs) and constraints on morphology (for instance: plural -s is
restricted to native words ending in /a, o, u/ and native words ending in a syllable with schwa;
hence, the plural forms trams and e-mails indicate that these words are non-native). On the
basis of such criteria, the etymological distinctions are recoverable from the synchronic spo-
ken mode even for language users without any knowledge of foreign languages.
The orthography reflects the difference between native and non-native words, since partly
different sets of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion rules are used (indicated in figure 3 by the
two routes for native and non-native morphemes) with, for instance, the graphemes c, q, th, y,
and χ for non-native words only, cf.:
(2) non-native native sounds
camera 'camera' kamer 'room' Μ
guasi 'quasi' kwaad 'angry' Dd
ether 'ether' eter 'eater' /t/
hypo these 'hypothesis' hier 'here' Ν
examen 'test' heks 'witch' /ks/
Literacy therefore leads to awareness of the distinction between native and non-native mor-
phemes.
The general model in figure 1 of how speaking and writing can be related is not only com-
plicated by the difference between the spelling of native and non-native words, but also by the
existence of autonomous spelling rules. One of the reasons to incorporate such rules in the
model of Dutch orthography is the presence of allography in examples such as:
(3) stem derived form spelling
bak - bak+er -> bakker 'baker'
judo - hij judo+t -> hij judoot (third person ending of the verbal stem to judo)
laan - laan+en lanen 'lanes'
vers - ietsvers+s -> ietsvers 'something fresh'
No phonological alternation is involved here. In order to account for such forms of allogra-
phy, Nunn (1998: 183 ff.) proposes a set of autonomous graphotactic rules, i.e. rules that
operate on grapheme sequences, such as the following ones for gemination and degemination.
The formulation of Nunn's rules has been simplified for expository reasons. C abbreviates for
consonant letters, V for vowel letters, and dots indicate syllable boundaries. The distinction
between short and long vowels is not one of phonetic duration, but rather expresses the feet

16 Anneke Neijt
that short vowels may combine with a coda that consists of more consonants than the coda
following long vowels.
(4) a. Orthographic gemination
C CC after a short vowel at the end of the syllable
V -> VV for long vowels when a C follows within the syllable
b. Orthographic degemination
VV V when syllable final
CC -> C when syllable final
The derivation of the words presented in (4) runs as follows (backslashes indicating the
underlying orthographic forms):
(5) a. Conversion of morphemes
/bak/ ak\ /ar/ \er
/jydo/ \judo\ /t/
/lan/ \laan\ /an/ \en
/vers/ \vers\ /s/ \s
b. Concatenation of morphemes and syllabification
a.ker
\ju.dot
\laa.nen
\verss
c. Application of orthographic (de) gemination rules, cf. (4)
<bakker>
<judoot>
<lanen>
<vers>
As a result of these orthographic rules, vowel letters for short vowels are always followed by
a consonant within the syllable, whereas syllable-final vowel letters represent long vowels. It
is because of this pattern that short and long vowels in the literature on Dutch orthography are
called 'covered vowels' and 'free/uncovered vowels' (Dutch gedekte and ongedekte/vrije
vocalen). Covered vowels are always followed by a consonant letter within the syllable,
whereas uncovered vowels may occur at the end of syllables:
(6) covered/short vowels covered by C-gemination uncovered/long vowels
[kanta] kan.ten 'sides' [ka.re] kan.nen 'cans' [mans] ma.nen 'moons'
[keldar] kel.der 'cellar' [be.la] bellen 'bells' [bens] be.nen 'legs'
[pbfte] plof.te 'plumped' [pb.fo] plof.fen 'to plump' [pokar] po.ker 'poker'
This generalization holds in orthography but is present in phonology as well: intervocalic
consonants after short vowels are ambisyllabic, as demonstrated in experiments in which
speakers of Dutch are forced to explicitly syllabify such examples (cf. Rietveld 1983 and
Sandra et al. 1996). The experiments show that speakers' judgments are influenced by ortho-
graphy. However, interestingly, illiterate speakers of Dutch and pre-school children also pre-
sent analyses with ambisyllabic consonants, though significantly less than the literate partici-
pants for whom the spelling rules seem to enhance ambisyllabic responses.

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 17
The only exceptions to the generalization that short/covered vowels are followed by a con-
sonant within the syllable are loan words such as sjwa [sjwa] 'schwa' and exclamations such
as bah [ba] 'ugh!' and joh [jo] (an exhortative word, presumably derived fromjongen 'boy').
In the latter cases, <h> has the function of covering the short vowel at the level of orthogra-
phy.
With the introduction of autonomous orthographic rules, the process of writing becomes a
two-step derivation. The first step is conversion from phonemes to graphemes and the second
step is the set of autonomous spelling rules for the conversion from graphemes to graphemes.
Arguments in favor of this position are based on the observation that the two sets of rules dis-
play different characteristics (Nunn 1998: 131):
(7) phoneme-to-grapheme autonomous
conversion rules spelling rules
context phonological orthographic
domain morpheme word
native/non-native sensitive yes no
The following short summary of spelling /i/ in Dutch will illustrate the characteristics of the
conversion rules (backslashes again indicate underlying orthographical forms):
(8) Conversion rules for Iii
a. Iii -> \ie\ in native morphemes {betel 'kittle')
b. Iii \ie\ in the last syllable of non-native morphemes (komiek 'comic', natie
'nation')
c. I\l -> \i\ in non-native morphemes, when not the last syllable (titel 'title')
These rules take phonological information as their input and are restricted to the morpheme-
domain. Rules (a) and (c) show that the native/non-native distinction is relevant. Both kietel
and titel are monomorphemes, and hence, only the conversion rules can be responsible for the
spelling difference. Rule (b) shows that information on morpheme boundaries is essential.
Final syllables in native and non-native morphemes are spelled <ie>.
Diaeresis placement may illustrate the characteristics of autonomous rules. This rule
applies to ambiguous letter strings: because aa, oo, and uu encode one sound in (9a), a diaere-
sis should be used in (9b) where the two vowels indicate two sounds (resp., uncovered/long
and covered/short ones). Because ii, eo, and ue are not in use as a digraph, no diaeresis should
be used for these letter pairs, cf. (10).
(9) a. [a] baal 'bale' b. [aa] Baäl 'biblical name'
[o] koor 'choir' [oa] coördinatie 'coordination'
[y] postuum 'posthumous' [yy] vacuum 'vacuum'
(10) a. [ii] kopiist 'copyist' b. * kopiist
[30] geolied 'oiled' *geölied
Μ ambigue 'ambiguous + inflection' * ambigue
The following examples show that diaereses occur in native and non-native forms alike:

18 Anneke Neijt
(11) native words non-native words
geent 'grafted' geemotioneerd 'emotional'
knieen 'knees' manieen 'manias'
be'ihvloed 'influenced' geillustreerd 'illustrated'
Moreover, these examples are morphologically complex, which shows that the diaeresis rule
also applies across morphological boundaries, at the level of the word. Diaeresis placement
will be discussed below in section 6.1, where the fact that the rule makes use of phonological
information will lead to the conclusion that such graphotactic rules are not autonomous.
In sum: Nunn finds evidence for her two-step hypothesis in the clustering of characteristics
of the rules involved. Her two-step analysis will be taken as a point of departure for the
remainder of this paper, but arguments will be presented against the claim that the context of
autonomous spelling rules consists purely of orthographic information. First, evidence will be
presented that phoneme-to-grapheme conversion rules are based on information from differ-
ent levels (section 3) and that the Orthographically Relevant Level is different for native and
non-native words (section 4).
3. Phonological rules expressed in Dutch writing
In this section, rules will be discussed that show that some morphemes are spelled according
to the phonemic level, but that a more superficial level must be assumed for other morphemes.
Nunn's conclusion was that the more superficially spelled allomorphs are stored in the lexi-
con, even though phonological rules predict their distribution. In the absence of independent
arguments for this position, one might claim equally well that the cases discussed are counter-
examples to the Consistency Hypothesis and that there are several Orthographically Relevant
Levels for Dutch.
3.1. Voice assimilation
As illustrated above, Dutch spelling is based on a deep phonological level at which, for
instance, the rule of Final Devoicing has not been applied. Hond and heb are written, even
though [hont] and [hep] are pronounced. Dutch orthography, however, reflects Perseverative
Devoicing in past tense suffixes, cf.:
(12) Dutch past tenses
[d] stem - stemde 'vote - voted'
tob - tobde 'worry - worried'
kano - kanode 'canoe - canoed'
[t] lek-lekte 'leak-leaked'
hoop - hoopte 'hope - hoped'
straf- strafte 'punish - punished'

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 19
The fact that Perseverative Devoicing in past tenses is expressed in spelling comes as a sur-
prise, given that Dutch spelling generally expresses the underlying form of d/t-allophony.
The inconsistent spelling of past tenses has been explained in the literature by referring to
Readability, an output constraint that requires lekte, Hoopte, and plofte instead of *lekde,
*hoopde, and *plofde. The Readability Requirement has been incorporated in the Principle of
Uniformity by Te Winkel (1863: 12) as follows:
(13) Principle of Uniformity (Regel der Gelijkvormigheid)
Give the same orthographic form to a word and to its constituent parts, as far as
pronunciation allows this.1
This explanation has been repeated in later publications (for instance, in Booij et al. 1979),
but the Readability condition has never been explicitly formulated (but cf. Neef, this volume).
There are reasons to doubt that Readability can be so formulated that it accounts for the
spelling of past tenses in Dutch. First, observe that the reading process is quite robust, as
illustrated by examples such as politie 'police' and politiek 'politics' (with <tie> indicating
[tsi] in the first word and [ti] in the second one) and diminutives such as cremepje (lit. 'small
cream', i.e. cream in small pots or tubes), written with three syllables and pronounced with
only two. Such examples show that the relation between spelling and pronunciation may be a
loose one, as long as the morphemes are recognized and get a stable spelling.
The second argument comes from English. Observe that past tenses in English are also
subject to Perseverative Devoicing, but that these verbs receive a morphological spelling.
(14) English past tenses
[id] lift-lifted
[d] puzzle - puzzled
[t] look - looked
If these forms are not problematic for English readers, why then would the deep spellings
*lekde, *hoopde, and *strafde be problematic for Dutch readers? Presumably, Readability is a
universal requirement, related to the language processing capacities available to human
beings. When languages differ, the differences should be explainable on the basis of other
characteristics of the languages, and no such explanation seems to be available for these
cases.
In order to maintain the hypothesis that phonemic representations of morphemes form the
input for spelling, Nunn proposes a lexical approach to past tense allography. She assumes
that these suffixes are stored in their more superficial forms -te and -de (cf. Nunn 1998: 63
and 136) and that not only storage of underlying forms, but also the option of what she calls
'competing allomorphs' is available in Dutch orthography. Evidence from the spoken mode
for the special status of past tense suffixes is then called for. As long as such evidence is
lacking, these instances might as well illustrate that some morphemes (be it a finite list) get a
more superficial spelling, whereas the spelling of most morphemes is in agreement with the
underlying phonological representation. But this alternative would be in conflict with the
Consistency Hypothesis.
' Geef, zooveel de uitspraak toelaat, aan een zelfde woord en aan ieder deel, waaruit het bestaat, steeds
denzelfde vorm.

20 Armeke Neijt
Another way to maintain the Consistency Hypothesis, more in line with Sproat (2000),
would be to assume that Dutch orthography is based on some intermediate level, after the
application of Perseverative Devoicing but before all other phonological rules apply. This
proposal conflicts with the traditional, derivational approach of Dutch voicing assimilation
present in the literature on Dutch phonology; cf. Zonneveld (1983), who claims that Final
Devoicing is ordered before all other assimilation rules. Of course, other analyses of Dutch
voicing assimilation can be provided. For instance, analyses with another domain of applica-
tion for Final Devoicing (not the word, but the syllable), with another underlying form of the
past tense suffix, or with a lexically governed rule of Perseverative Devoicing, different from
the general rule of Progressive Assimilation in Dutch. But it seems hard to find independent
evidence to choose between these alternative approaches, which is one of the reasons why the
derivational approach is no longer the predominant model of phonological research.
As long as derivational models do not provide independent evidence for a specific rule
ordering, the conclusion must be that the Consistency Hypothesis cannot be tested. Rather
than forwarding claims about some intermediate level and more in line with newer insights in
the interaction of components, one should conclude that the underlying phonemic representa-
tion is the input to Dutch orthography, except for a finite list of morphemes of which the
allomorphs are distinguished in orthography.
3.2. Diminutive allomorphy and d-insertion
Nunn (1998: 62) proposes the competing allomorph analysis also for the spelling of diminu-
tives and for the spelling of agentive and comparative -er, cf.:
(15) allomorphy/allography of diminutive suffixes -etje, -tje, -pje, -Ige, -je
bloem - bloemetje 'flower'
laan - laantje 'lane'
oom - oompje 'uncle'
koning - koninkje 'king'
koek - koekje 'cookie'
(16) allomorphy/allography of -er, -der
roep - roeper 'call - caller'
hoor - hoorder 'hear - hearer'
mooi - mooier 'beautiful - more beautiful'
raar - raarder 'weird - weirder'
The choice between diminutive suffixes is predictable on the basis of phonological contexts,
but some diminutives get an idiosyncratic meaning which may form an argument for consid-
ering diminutive allomorphy as a lexicalized process. The rule of d-insertion before agentive
and comparative -er, on the other hand, is productive and fully predictable. Therefore, the
competing allomorph analysis is not more likely to be present for these morphemes than it is
for any other morpheme. Hence, as long as no additional evidence is provided, -er/-der
allography forms an argument against the Consistency Hypothesis.

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 21
3.3. Nasal assimilation
Nasal Assimilation is usually not expressed in orthography, indicating that the phonemic level
is the Orthographically Relevant Level:
(17) /n/ [n] <n> onaardig'not nice'
/n/ -> [m] <n> onprettig 'unpleasant'
/n/ [η] <n> onklaar 'out of order'
In non-native morphemes, however, Nasal Assimilation is present in orthography for the
labial nasals, but not for the velar ones:
(18) /n/[m] <m> implosie'implosion'
/n/ -> [η] <n> incapabel 'incapable'
The same pattern holds in English and German. At first sight, the Consistency Hypothesis is
faced with two problems: the difference between native and non-native words, and within the
non-native words, the difference between labial and velar nasals. The latter problem, how-
ever, can be discarded by an autonomous spelling rule that forbids the strings ngk and ngc
within words. The existence of this rule can be shown by diminutive formations such as
honing - koninkje ('king - small king').
The different reflection in orthography of Nasal Assimilation in labial contexts could be
accounted for if Nasal Assimilation in non-native words could be shown to be lexicalized.
However, contractions and emphatic use show that the underlying form is in when the context
for the phonological rule is absent:
(19) in-en export 'in-and export' (existing phrase, next to import)
in- en exploderende Stoffen 'in- and exploding substances'
(possible phrase, next to imploderend)
in-, in-, implausibel 'very implausible' (possible phrase, with emphatic repetition)
ik zei /«-plausibel Ί said /'«-plausible' (corrective use, no Nasal Assimilation)
It is again possible to maintain the Consistency Hypothesis by the claim of differences in
storage. Native in- is stored in its phonemic form, non-native in- is stored in its three phonetic
forms in-, im-, and ing- (with subsequent deletion of <g> by a graphotactic rule).
In sum, some affixes receive a more superficial spelling than provided by the phonemic
level. Nunn proposes storage of so-called competitive allomorphs for such cases. This allows
for lexical idiosyncrasies, which indeed occur. The Consistency Hypothesis claims that there
exists one level that provides this information: the phonological rules involved in these affixes
should all precede the phonological rules not expressed in orthography. As argued at the end
of section 3.1, it will be difficult to find evidence for the rule ordering required by the Con-
sistency Hypothesis.
On the other hand, storage of allomorphs leaves unanswered the question why some allo-
morphs are stored and others are not. Booij (p.c.) suggested another route of explanation
instead of ordering, based on the observation that some phonological rules are general and
others are restricted to specific morphemes. Rule ordering then need not be the explaining
factor. Rather, some economy principle would be at work, such that orthography neglects
general, 'unavoidable' or 'automatic' rules. This may indeed be the case, but: it cannot be the

22 Anneke Neijt
full answer. Observe that according to this hypothesis, other instances of Dutch orthography
will be inconsistent. For instance: devoicing of fricatives at the end of words is a general rule
of Dutch phonology, but still, the superficial form is spelled in words such as huis and leef
(which have underlying voiced fricatives, witnessed by the inflected forms huizen and leveri).
Other examples illustrating that there is no tendency to avoid representation of general pho-
nological rules in Dutch are vowel reduction in words such as apostel, cirkel ('apostle, circle',
with derived forms apostolisch and circulair), nasal assimilation in monomorphemic words
such as ramp 'disaster', and degemination at the end of words. Perhaps all these counter-
examples can be explained on the basis of graphotactic rules, but the question to be answered
then is why such graphotactic rules violate an otherwise sensible constraint on the ortho-
graphic system for Dutch.
4. Native and non-native morphology
The spelling of non-native words in Dutch differs systematically from the spelling of native
words. Above, in (2), examples are presented with c, q, th, y, and x, letters that are not in use
for the sounds /k, t, i, ks/ in native words. More subtle differences exist in the spelling of
vowels. In native words, long (or uncovered) vowels are spelled with digraphs and short (or
covered) vowels are written with a single letter, cf. (20). In non-native words, however, all
vowels are written with a single letter, cf. (21a), except when they occur in the final syllable
of the word, cf. (21b):
(20) native words
short vowel
[a] handel
[ε] verder
[x] mispel
[o] koster
[y] durven
long vowel
[a] vaandel
[e] meerder
[i] kietel
[o] klooster
fy] huurder
(21) a. non-native words, nonfinal syllables b. non-native words, final syllables
long vowel
[a] amalgaam
[e] gareel
[i] muziek
[o] piloot
[y] minuut
The difference between long and short vowels does not seem to be a phonemic difference in
non-native words, which is why variation of pronunciation may occur. For instance: apotheek
with a first long vowel and apotheose with a first short vowel occur, though perhaps less fre-
quently as the other way around. Only a keen listener will notice when muskiet and stucwerk
are pronounced [myskit] and [stYkwerk] instead of the more usual [mYskit] and [stykwerk].
short vowel long vowel short vowel
[a] apotheek [a] apotheose [a] sesam
[ε] echo [e] mechanisch [ε] rebel
[I] distichon [i] diploma Μ passim
Μ comite [o] homoniem [ο] complot
Μ muskiet [y] stucwerk Μ museum

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 23
Minimal pairs based on vowel length (such as komma 'comma' and coma) are hard to find in
the set of non-native words, presumably because vowel length distinctions played a minor
role in the donor language Latin, in which liber 'book' and liber 'free' is one of the few
examples of a minimal pair based on this distinction.
The above examples illustrate that different conversion rules apply to the two classes of
words. The following examples show that the domain at which conversion takes place differs
also (Nunn 1998: 93):
(22) a. stem b. native suffix c. non-native suffix
Fries Friezin frisisme 'Frisian - Frisian woman - frisism'
limiet limieten limiteer 'limit - limits - to limit'
trochee trocheeen troche'isch 'trochee - trochees - trochaic'
station stationnetje stationair 'station - small station - stationary'
Starting with a native or non-native stem, cf. (22a), a native morpheme added to it results in a
spelling without adaptation, cf. (22b). This is what the Consistency Hypothesis predicts in
combination with the assumption that morphemes form the domain of phoneme-to-grapheme
conversion. When, however, a non-native suffix is added, the stem is spelled as if the word
were monomorphematic: long vowels are written with a single letter, cf. (22c). Nunn accounts
for this spelling behavior by assuming that non-native morphology is ignored. Complex deri-
vations with non-native affixation are treated as if they were monomorphematic.
The solution proposed by Nunn meets some difficulties. First, the above examples of con-
traction and emphatic use presented in connection with Nasal Assimilation (in- en export, in-
plausible etc.) show that morphological structure is present in non-native derivations. Second,
a set of correspondence rules is needed to account for spelling idiosyncrasies that occur in
non-native sets of words such as context - contextueel, tekst - intertekst - intertekstueel,
medievist - medievistiek, quaestor - quaestrix. Morphemes of non-native complex words
receive a constant, though sometimes idiosyncratic spelling, but the spelling of sets of mor-
phologically related non-native words cannot be considered completely ad hoc. Context and
tekst form the basis of the two sets of consistent spellings; ae is replaced by e in ether (<
aether) and forms derived from ether, but not in quaestor and its derived forms. Third, con-
sonant geminates in non-native words are the reflection of morphological structure, cf. accla-
matie - declamatie, adduceren - deduceren, collocatie - dislocatie. When writers are aware
of this kind of morphology, this shows that non-native morphology is present in the language
system and reflected in orthography.
On the other hand, some distributional facts will receive an explanation by a level in
between non-native and native morphology (cf. Van Beurden 1987): given such a level, non-
native morphemes would be closer to roots and stems than native morphemes, which is
generally true, although productive formations to the contrary exist (cf. Haas & Trommelen
1993: 459 ff.) (in (23), boldfaced sub-, hyper-, and -eer are non-native affixes, the other
affixes are native):

24 Anneke Neijt
(23) a. General pattern
spelling morphology
groepering (((groep) eer) ing) 'grouping'
verdisconteer (ver((dis(cont))eer)) 'negotiate'
b. Exceptions
spelling morphology
subafdeling (sub(afTdeelY)ing) 'subsection'
hypergevoelig (hyper((ge(voel))ig)) 'hyper-sensitive'
Perhaps sub-, hyper-, and the like are to be grouped together with the native ones. (For Eng-
lish, non-native prefixes are claimed to belong to Class II, cf. Giegerich 1999 and previous
literature.) In that case, the different spelling behavior of native and non-native morphemes
can be combined with the Consistency Hypothesis when a level in between non-native and
native morphology is assumed to form the input for phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, and
the elements converted are native morphemes and non-native complex forms. In that case, a
new solution must be found for idiosyncratic spellings of related non-native formations and
for consonant geminates in contexts where orthographic gemination does not apply.
The level ordering hypothesis and stratum-oriented models never succeeded in adequately
describing the morphological patterns available in languages such as English, German, and
Dutch. Instead, approaches with restrictions for individual morphemes seem to be more suc-
cessful, cf. Fabb 1988, Neef 1996, Plag 1999, and Hay 1999. In line with these more recent
approaches, the competing allomorph analysis forwarded by Nunn, and hence storage of
spelling forms for individual morphemes, seems to be more promising than the search for one
level as the input for writing.
5. Punctuation
The orthographic rules that mirror segmental phonology take morphological words as their
maximal domain. For other aspects of orthography, i.e. punctuation, larger domains are rele-
vant. For instance: words in a phrase are separated by spaces, words in compounds are written
together. When a phrase is embedded in a word, the spaces are eliminated, which offers the
opportunity to disambiguate in writing what may be ambiguous in speaking, cf.:
(24) phrase compound
klein kind 'small child' kleinkind 'grandchild'
vuile grondaffaire 'dirty affair about land' vuilegrondaffaire 'affair about polluted
land'
oude mannen 'old men' oudemannenhuis 'old men's house'
Moreover, larger syntactic or prosodic constituents can be distinguished in orthography.
Capital letters and dots surround utterances, and commas or semicolons separate the parts of
enumeration (as in English), with subtle distributional differences that may signal coordina-
tion embedded within coordination: Jan, Karel en Harry; Kees, Marie en Piet; en Susan,
John en Martin. There are indications that the distribution of punctuation signs relates to the

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 25
thematic structure of the text (cf. Bredel, this volume). The following list of orthographic
means for representing information from different linguistic levels illustrates the issue, but is
not meant to be exhaustive:
(25) orthography
spaces
capital letters
capital letters
capital letters and dots
commas
semicolons
indents or white lines
dash
linguistic level
syntax: syntactic words
semantics: proper names
syntax: German nouns
syntax or prosody: utterances
syntax: clauses, coordinated constituents
syntax: coordination with embedded coordination
syntax: domain of pronominal reference
semantics: change of focus
This list shows that the Orthographically Relevant Level needs to be an all-encompassing
representation of the utterance, including syntactic and semantic information. The Consis-
tency Hypothesis claims, however, that writing is based on a single level of information, e.g.
that it translates sounds of a certain level into letters.
6. Linguistic information for graphotactic rules
According to the null hypothesis, the output of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion would be
the string of letters. Nothing more. However, there is abundant evidence in the formulation of
autonomous spelling rules that the representation is more articulate. Word and morpheme
boundaries are retained, as is some information about the connection between successive
words and morphemes, witnessed by the use of spaces, for instance. In this section, the kind
of information necessary in the formulation of graphotactic rules will be discussed. It will be
shown that graphotactic rules and phonological rules of the later stages of the derivation share
characteristics which make it necessary to assume a close relationship between the two sets of
rules.
The discussion will take as its point of departure the proposal by Nunn (1998: 32-34) to
carry over to orthography the morphological structure and specific parts of the segmental
phonological information, e.g. the distinction between vowel letters and consonant letters and
information about length of vowels. Nunn proposes representations such as (26) to handle the
fact that <ee> and <e> may be long vowels (VV) and that <e> may represent a short vowel
(V) as well.
(26) letter tier ee e e
II Λ I
CV-tier VV VV V
Nunn assumes that these two tiers are sufficient:

26 Anneke Neijt
The use of orthographic CV-structure based on the pronunciation accounts for the feet that spelling needs
more phonological information than can be encoded by letters only, without stating that all phonological
information has to be available. (Nunn 1998: 34)
However, in her formulation of autonomous rules, she uses the CV-structure both as a way to
distinguish long vowels from short ones and as a generalization for the set of underlying con-
sonant letters and vowel letters that form the input of autonomous rules. In actual feet, thus,
she uses two CV-tiers, a phonological one and an orthographic one (for the underlying repre-
sentation of the orthography). Below, arguments will be presented that both kinds of CV-tiers
are needed.
6.1. Capitalization and Diaeresis Placement
The rules of orthography that show the need for a more elaborate, three-tiered, representation
are Capitalization and Diaeresis Placement. First, look at Capitalization. Dutch has one
special letter in its alphabet: <ij>. Despite its appearance, <ij> is one letter, not a digraph, as
shown by capital use:
(27) letter <ij> digraphs <aa, au, ch, ie, ...>
IJs *AArde, »AUto, »CHaos, *IEmand, ...
*Ijs Aarde, Auto, Chaos, Iemand,...
'ice' 'earth, car, chaos, someone,...'
In former days, ij was one touch on Dutch typewriters, and if necessary, y was used where ij
was meant (or vice versa: the birth registration officer once wrote down Neijt instead of Neyt).
The distinction between the letter <ij> and the digraphs must be captured in the ortho-
graphical CV-tier:
(28) orth-CV-tier <V> <VV> <CC> <VV>
I II II Μ
letter tier ij aa ch ie
Λ Λ I Λ
phon-CV-tier fW/ /VV/ /C/ /VV/
The second rule that needs more than one kind of CV-tier is Diaereses Placement. The two
dots above vowel letters that function as umlaut in many languages (and in some Dutch loans
such as loss, überhaupt) are used in Dutch productively as separators for strings of vowel let-
ters that could have been interpreted as digraphs (cf. (9b) above and Van Heuven, this
volume):
(29) a. Digraph
baal, geen [bal, χεη] 'bale, none'
reus, blazoen [r0s, bla-zun] 'giant, blazon'
b. Two monographs
Baal, geent [ba-αΐ, χο-εηί] biblical name, 'grafted'
reiinie, kanoen [re-jy-ni, ka-no-wan] 'reunion, to canoe'

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 27
In Nunn's notation, long vowels get the same notation as a pair of short vowels. The left-hand
and right-hand examples above will thus get the same representation for the relevant vowel
letters (Nunn 1998: 32-4), and there is no basis for the diaeresis rule to distinguish the two
sets:
(30) orth-CV-tier <CVVC> <CC VC WO
I I I I I I I I I II
letter tier baal blazoen
In a notation with three tiers, digraphs relate as an entity to the phonemic CV-tier, as repre-
sented above for <aa> and <ie>. From an orthographic point of view, these are two letters, but
they correspond to one sound, which is what prevents application of the diaeresis rule.
Another argument that at least two tiers are needed comes from the representation of the
glide /j/, which can be represented by a consonant letter or by a vowel letter. Representation
of the glide by a vowel letter may result in an ambiguous letter string, later to be disambigu-
ated by diaeresis placement, cf. boeien [bujan] and Bedoe'iert [beduwin]:
(31) orth-CV-tier CVVVVO <C V C V V WO
I I I I I I I I I I I I I I
letter tier b ο e i en 'cuffs' Β e d ο e ϊ e η 'Bedouin'
The orthographical CV-tier offers no opportunity to distinguish both instances; it is the pho-
nological tier that shows where a syllable boundary is present: CVCVC will be syllabified as
CV.CVC, whereas CVCVVC will be syllabified as CV.CV.VC, with subsequent addition of
the diaeresis.
In sum: a representation with an orthographical and a phonological CV-tier presents the
opportunity to distinguish orthography and phonology in those cases that are not isomorphic.
Graphotactic rules need both kinds of information. For instance: <ij> is one letter for a long
vowel, <ch> is a combination of two letters for one consonant. Moreover, some phonological
information is carried over in order to distinguish digraphs from pairs of monographs (<aa>
for a long vowel or for two consecutive short ones) and to disambiguate as either a vowel
or a consonant. Two conclusions follow. First, the orthographic representation is a multi-
tiered representation, and information from different levels is needed in the formulation of
autonomous spelling rules. Second, the fact that phonology and orthography distinguish con-
sonants and vowels in similar ways cannot be a coincidence. Rather than being completely
autonomous, the orthography is partly a copy of the phonology.
6.2. Syllabification
Β a ä 1 kano en
I V I I I I II ν ν ι
CV C V VC phon-CV-tier CVCVC
From the Consistency Hypothesis it follows that orthographic rules should form an autono-
mous component; only one level can be relevant for a given writing system, and graphotactic
rules should all refer to this level only. Later stages of the phonological derivation should not

28 Anneke Neijt
be relevant to a writing system. Orthographic syllabification, however, is sometimes depend-
ent on the spoken form.
Take a look first at instances of spoken and written syllabification in Dutch showing that
different rules are involved. When speaking, especially in non-emphatic contexts, syllables
may be formed from parts of different morphemes within a word or sometimes of different
words in compounds, phrases, or sentences. In writing, syllable boundaries respect all word
boundaries and some morpheme boundaries; cf. (32), in which dots or spaces indicate ortho-
graphic syllable boundaries and hyphens indicate phonological syllable boundaries:
(32) orthography
ont.aarden
aard.appels
heel.al
wel.is.waar
phonology
on-tardan
ar-dapals
he-lal
we-lis-war
'k ga't'm zeg.gen kxa-tam-ze-xen
'k wist't kwis-tat
lit. 'to de-earth', 'to degenerate'
'potatoes'
lit. 'whole-all', 'universe'
lit. 'it is true', 'indeed'
lit. Ί will-it-him tell', Ί will tell him that'
Ί knew it'
The examples (33) show that syllabification in phonology is based on the segmental string
only, whereas syllabification in orthography refers also to morpheme boundaries. Because of
this, the orthographic syllable boundaries need not coincide with the phonological ones in
complex word forms, cf. the mismatches of phonological and orthographic syllables in the b-
examples of (33):
(33) phonology orthography
a. [ra:r-sta] raar.ste stem raar, suffixes -st and -e 'weirdest'
b. [sxa:r-sta] schaars.te stem Schaars, suffix -te 'scarcity'
a. [ko:r-tja] koor.tje stem koor, suffix -tje 'small choir'
b. [ko:r-tjs] koord.je stem koord, suffix -je 'small cord'
a. [diploma-tja] diploma.tje stem diploma, suffix -tje 'small certificate'
b. [diploma-tja] diplomaat.je stem diplomaat, suffix -je 'small diplomate'
a. [dam-sta] dom.ste stem dom, suffixes -st and -e 'stupidest'
b. [fran-sta] frons.te stem frons, suffix -te 'frowned'
In orthography, prefixes form a separate orthographic syllabification domain (cf. ont.aarden
in (32)), as do consonant initial suffixes (-te, -st, -tje, -je in (33)). Another instance of a
mismatch of phonological and orthographic syllables can be found in words with repre-
senting a glide. Interestingly, words such as baaien [ba-jan] 'bays' and bajes [ba-jas] 'prison',
which are similar in all relevant phonological respects, get the different orthographic syllabi-
fication baai.en and bajes. The generalization is, that in orthography a syllable boundary is
present after that represents a glide, even if this would imply that more orthographic syl-
lables are created than are present in speaking: financieel consists of four written syllables,
but has only three phonological ones: fl. nan. ci. eel [fi-nan-sjel]. Similarly, after repre-
senting a glide an orthographic syllable boundary is present, cf. linguist with three written
syllables, but only two phonological ones: lin.gu.ist [liq-wist].

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 29
The differences between syllables in writing and speaking may not lead to the conclusion
that orthographic syllabification is based on the string of letters and morpheme boundaries
alone. As with speaking, syllabification is dependent on the maximal onset principle, cf.
kar.tel - ka.trol, her.pes - ci.pres, hel.pen - di.ploma. Clusters of consonants of decreasing
sonority must be split; clusters of increasing sonority may form the onset of the following
syllable. This can be captured by autonomous rules only if information about the sonority of
the sounds is carried over to the letters. Alternatively, phonological syllabification may form
the input to orthography. There is some evidence that the latter option is the correct one.
Observe that for some morphemes, variation in pronunciation occurs. For instance: bio-
and syn- are pronounced [bi-jo], [bi-jo], [sin], or [sin]. In such cases, orthographic syllabifi-
cation follows the most common pronunciation for that morpheme in words. That is, the pre-
scribed orthographic forms bio.sfeer, bios.coop, sy.no.niem, syn.er.ge.tisch correlate with the
common pronunciations [bi-jo-sfe:r], [bi-jos-kop], [si-no-nim] and [sm-?er-xe-tis]. The varia-
tion co-occurs with vowel length: when <o> is a long vowel, the syllable boundary follows
immediately thereafter, when <o> is a short vowel, the syllable ends in <s>. Pronunciation
and writing therefore go hand in hand.
If phonological syllabification is indeed the input of orthographic syllabification, then
Nunn's autonomous spelling rules can no longer be considered autonomous. The context of
orthographical syllabification must include information about phonological syllables. Her
two-step analysis remains unchallenged, of course.
6.3. Degemination
In adjectives formed by the suffix -s following a stem ending in -s, degemination is system-
atically represented, but it is not represented in similar genitives, cf. the adjective Parijs and
the genitive Parijs', both with the morphological structure stem+s.
(34) a. Adjective forming -s
een Amsterdams huis
een Parijs bonbonnetje
b. Genitive forming -s
Amsterdams grachten
Parijs' wegennet
<Amsterdam + s> 'an Amsterdam-like house'
<Parijs + s> 'a Parisian bonbon'
<Amsterdam + s> 'Amsterdam's canals'
<Parijs + s> 'Paris's road system'
In phonology, the adjective forming -s and the genitive forming -s are nondistinct, as one
would expect given a framework where phonology and morphosyntax form different compo-
nents of the grammar, e.g. prosodic phonology (Selkirk 1984, Nespor and Vogel 1986). At the
stage where degemination applies, information about morphological categories such as the
distinction between the derivational adjective forming suffix -s and the inflectional genitival
-s is no longer present. The spelling examples given above show that orthography distin-
guishes the two phonologically similar suffixes: degemination applies in both cases, but an
apostrophe forms a trace of the deletion site in case the suffix is genitival.

30 Ameke Neijt
Of course, it will be interesting to answer the question why the degemination rule is
reflected in one class of words and not in the other. The answer can be found presumably in
the inflection available for adjectives, cf.:
(35) Amsterdamse huizen 'Amsterdam-like houses'
Parijse bonbonnetjes 'Parisian bonbons'
*Parijs'e bonbonnetjes
Adding inflectional -e changes the function of the apostrophe. Before or after a space, apos-
trophes are unambiguous traces of deletion, cf. (36a). But when an apostrophe is surrounded
by letters, it usually functions as a linking element, cf. (36b):
(36) a. apostrophe next to space = trace of deletion
'k ga naar huis < ik ga naar huis Ί will go home'
Als't regent < Als het regent 'When it rains'
Max' regenjas < axs regenjas 'Max's raincoat'
b. apostrophe between letters = linking sign
baby'tje 'small baby'
menu's 'menus'
NP's 'NPs'
A4'tje 'piece of A4-paper'
Examples of apostrophes as traces of deletion in between letters exist, cf. (37), but this use is
highly restricted. It only occurs in idiosyncratic abbreviations (a frequently used name) or in
contractions (indicating a schwa sound):
(37) apostrophe between letters = trace of deletion
A'dam < Amsterdam (not a general rule)
ik heb d'r gezien < ik heb haar gezien Ί saw her' (general, but restricted to schwa)
This may explain why the apostrophe is not used in adjectives: the apostrophe in Parijs'e
bonbonnetjes would be interpreted as a linking sign, not as a trace of deletion.
A consistent pattern could arise also when genitive -s would be treated as the adjectival -s,
without an apostrophe indicating the deletion site. However, this would cause ambiguity in
names for which a stem with and without an -s occurs, cf. Philips boek (from: Philip+s) and
Philips' boek (from: Philips+s). When both requirements must be met (readability for apos-
trophes and an unambiguous representation for proper names), there is no way out but to
represent degemination inconsistently.
Here again, alternative approaches may rescue the Consistency Hypothesis. One may pro-
pose that there are two different rules of s-degemination, one for derivation (the adjective
forming -s) and one for inflection (the genitive -s), or that degemination applies cyclically,
such that there will be a stage in the phonological derivation at which adjectival degemination
has applied and genitive degemination has not. But such an approach would deny that the true
explanation of the inconsistency lies in an output constraint on the use of apostrophes and in
the need to represent names unambiguously. The idea of an Orthographically Relevant Level
that forms for each language the pivot between the spoken and written mode is interesting
because it restricts the options otherwise available, but provides a framework in which expla-
nations will not be found.

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 31
6.4. Stress
Stress in words is generally not reflected in Dutch orthography. There is one exception: the
spelling of morpheme-final /i/. In simplex forms, this IM is spelled <ie> in both stressed and
unstressed syllables. However, when a suffix is added that begins with a vowel, <ie> is
spelled in unstressed position and remains <ie> in stressed position, cf. the following
examples (underlines indicate stress):
(38) olie, menie 'oil, minium' olien, menien 'to oil, to minium'
drie, Strategie 'three, strategy' driegn, strategieen 'threes, strategies'
Stress assignment is based on syllables, cf. (39a), which not always coincide with morpheme
boundaries, cf. (39b):
(39) a. artistiek - artisticiteit 'artistic, artisticity'
winkel - winkelier 'shop, shopkeeper'
vijand - vijandig 'enemy, hostile'
leraar - lerares 'teacher, mistress'
neger - negerin 'Negro, Negress'
afwas - afwasbaar 'washing-up, washable'
b. art+ist+ic+iteit ar-tis-ti-ci-teit
winkel+ier win-ke-lier
vijand+ig vij-an-dig
ler+ar+es le-ra-res
neger+in ne-ge-rin
Hence, information of two kinds of structure are needed in orthography: morpheme structure
and syllable structure. Of course, one may call the combination of both a consistent level of
linguistic representation, but then a wider interpretation of this notion is intended.
7. The Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch
In the above sections on autonomous spelling rules, three kinds of arguments were forwarded
against a single Orthographically Relevant Level for Dutch. First, phonological and morpho-
logical information is carried over to a later stage where autonomous spelling rules apply.
Second, phonological information of shallower levels is needed for the proper application of
the autonomous rules. Finally, the autonomous rules are near copies of the phonological rules.
This leads to the conclusion that phonological rules and orthographical rules are closely
related, as if the orthographical component is working in parallel with the phonological com-
ponent.
Dutch orthography challenges the claim that languages universally obey the Consistency
Hypothesis. Whereas the conversion to the orthography is most profitably described when the
level of phonemic representations forms the input, one may not be led to the conclusion that
only the information of this single linguistic level provides sufficient information. As the sur-

32 Anneke Neijt
vey of section 2 shows, morphology is also relevant for Dutch; i.e., the domains are provided
by morphology, whereas the conversion rules refer to phonemes.
For some morphemes, a more superficial phonological level forms the input to the spelling
representation. As arguments for the different status of such morphemes cannot be found
(except that they are spelled differently), such spellings form counter-evidence to the Consis-
tency Hypothesis. Furthermore, the spelling of native and non-native morphemes is derived
by slightly different rules for both sets. Since non-native complex forms are spelled more as if
they are simplex forms, a different morphological level seems to be relevant for these two
strata of Dutch - a deeper level for the spelling of native formations (i.e. separate morphemes)
and a more superficial level for the spelling of non-native words (i.e. complex forms).
For the autonomous spelling rules, both phonological and orthographical information is
relevant. The phonological information relates in some cases to quite superficial levels, for
instance, at which syllable structure and stress are present. The conclusion must be that such
rules have letters as their target, but that they refer to the phonological context, also from later
stages than the phonemic level. The rules are not as autonomous as suggested by their name,
witnessed by the fact that orthographic rules look like phonological rules. When punctuation
rules are considered to belong to the class of autonomous rules (and nothing seems to contra-
dict this), then global information from morphology, syntax, and semantics also is needed in
the second stage of deriving the surface orthographical representation. The Orthographically
Relevant Level thus contains information of nearly all components of the grammar.
Given an incremental approach to language processing (see, for instance, Levelt 1989 and
Levelt et al. 1999) all information of earlier stages is retained in more superficial stages.
Then, the Consistency Hypothesis would be met trivially by the phonetic representation in all
languages, since information about phonemes, morpheme boundaries, morphological catego-
ries, syntactic categories, and the like would be present at that level. No restrictions would
follow from the Consistency Hypothesis, which then becomes superfluous.
The Consistency Hypothesis of course would be a natural constraint on the interface of lin-
guistic components. Given the above argument, however, the conclusion must be that the
orthographic component is not related in such a natural way to the components of the spoken
mode in Dutch, which represents information on syllables, morphemes, phonemes, phones,
and even parts of syntax and semantics. Perhaps this explains why the acquisition of literacy
is so different from the acquisition of natural languages, including sign languages.2
2 I am grateful to Geert Booij, Mirjam Ernestus, Anneke Nunn, Richard Wiese, and my both co-editors for
their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

The Interfaces of Writing and Grammar 33
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34 Anneke Neijt
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Richard Sproat
The Consistency of the Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch
1. Introduction
It is well-known that different orthographies are more or less faithful at representing the sur-
face phonological form of words - or in lay terms their pronunciation. An obvious example of
a fairly faithful orthographic system is Finnish; other systems that are typically claimed to be
faithful are Spanish and Serbo-Croatian.1 In each of these cases, it is generally possible to
predict the pronunciation of the word from its spelling, meaning for instance that someone
who does not know the language, but does know the letter-to-sound correspondences, will be
quite likely to correctly pronounce a word, even though that word is, by assumption, un-
familiar. Similarly, it is often possible to correctly spell a word in these orthographies (though
Spanish presents some problems here) given the word's pronunciation. At the other extreme
are orthographies that are relatively poor indicators of surface pronunciation and where the
spelling of a word is often hard to predict from the pronunciation. The archetypal instance of
such an orthography is English, but other examples abound, including French, Danish,
Hebrew, or Russian.
Though such 'unfaithful' orthographies are often termed 'deep' orthographies in the psy-
cholinguistic literature on reading, it is important to realize that there are three distinct senses
in which an orthography may fail to be faithful to the surface phonological form of a word:
1. The spelling may simply be idiosyncratic.
2. The spelling may have incomplete coverage.
3. The spelling may represent something other than the surface pronunciation of the word.
English abounds in instances of 1. There is, for example, no good reason why a word pro-
nounced /det/ should be spelled <debt>. There is similarly no synchronic reason why
<Worcester> should be the spelling of the name pronounced /wUsts(j)/: there is no evidence
that speakers have something like */wo(j)sest9(i)/ as an 'underlying' representation. In the
latter case, historical change in the pronunciation of the placename has simply divorced the
phonology from the orthography; in the former, we owe a debt of gratitude to scholars in the
sixteenth century who felt that <dette> should better be spelled <debt>, since it was derived
from Latin debitum (Sampson 1985: 199).
The clearest example of 2 is Modern Hebrew, where the standard orthography simply fails
to represent most vowels, and these vowels must therefore be provided by the reader.
1 I assume here that we are talking about standard orthography for a standard form of the language. One might
expect that standard orthography may be an unfaithful representation of 'non-standard' dialects, even if it is
faithful for the standard language.

36 Richard Sproat
Case 3 is exemplified by Russian. Russian orthography is for the most part quite regular,
but it may be hard to guess the spelling of a word from the pronunciation since, among other
things, the spelling represents underlying vowels, prior to the application of vowel reductions
that neutralize several underlying distinctions. (It is also hard to predict the pronunciation
from the spelling in Russian without knowing the stress placement on the word: stress in Rus-
sian is lexically determined and not marked in the standard orthography.) It is this third sense
in which an orthography can be 'deep' that is of interest here.
Comparing Russian and, say, Spanish, it becomes clear that different orthographies may
choose to encode a different level of phonological representation.2 In a traditional generative
phonological model, where the phonology of a language is described by a set of ordered rules,
one can speak of deeper levels (those near the beginning of the derivation) and more surface
levels (those near the end). An orthography might then pick a deeper or more surface level to
encode. In Sproat (2000) I termed this level the Orthographically Relevant Level (ORL), and I
made the substantive claim that the ORL is a consistent level of linguistic representation.
Consistency simply means that an orthography will pick a given level (in the sense just
described), and that level will be consistent for the entire vocabulary; it will, as a corollary,
also consistently represent or consistently fail to represent a given phonological process.3
A clear counterexample to Consistency would be a system where, for instance, the ortho-
graphic representation of nouns represented a certain phonological process - say, stem-final
obstruent devoicing - but the orthographic representation of verbs systematically Med to
represent this process. A similarly clear counterexample would be a case where a uniform
phonological process received a non-uniform orthographic representation. For example, one
might imagine that a language has a uniform rule of obstruent devoicing and that the applica-
tion of this rule is represented in the orthography (by the use of symbols, representing voice-
less obstruents in the appropriate places), the only exception being dentals, where under-
lyingly voiced segments are represented orthographically as voiced, even when they have
become devoiced. This would suggest, paradoxically, that there could be no coherent ORL for
this orthography, since the ORL could neither be said to be before the phonological process in
question, nor after it. In Sproat (2000), I examined an apparent example of such a case in
Serbo-Croatian, and I presented the results of a pilot experiment that provided phonetic evi-
dence that the supposedly uniform phonological process (obstruent devoicing in clusters) is in
2 Of course, orthographies often encode other information besides phonological information: we are interested
here only in the encoding of phonological information.
3 Richard Wiese has suggested a more restrictive notion of'Orthographically Relevant Level' (Wiese 1989)
where he suggests: „Das Ergebnis lexikalischer Regeln wird in den orthographischen Wortformen abgebildet,
das Ergebnis postlexikalischer Regeln nicht." ("The output of lexical rules is represented in the orthographic
forms of words, whereas the output of postlexical rules is not.") In a Lexical Phonology framework this
amounts to saying that the ORL is exactly the output of the lexical phonology. However, it is hard to see how
this can handle the case of Russian and Belarusian, described in detail in Sproat (2000), where the ortho-
graphic systems of the two languages encode different levels of what seem to be essentially identical
phonologies. Of course, by moving away from a restrictive notion such as Wiese's one can fairly be accused
of allowing oneself the full power of an SPE phonology, and one can be asked if this is not too high a price to
pay. As I also suggested in Sproat (2000), it would certainly be interesting to try to account for the orthogra-
phies of Russian and Belarusian in a more up-to-date phonological theory, such as Optimality Theory, thus
obviating a need to return to SPE. I await an account of this type.

The Consistency of the Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch 37
fact not uniform at all (Sproat 2000: 89-94). We will see another such apparent case from
Dutch in Section 2.1.
Consistency is clearly a more restrictive assumption than the alternative that orthographies
can pick and choose at will which words will represent which level of phonological represen-
tation. And among restrictive theories, Consistency is arguably the simplest. For these reasons
it makes sense to view Consistency as the null hypothesis, something that needs to be argued
against. Indeed, in Sproat (2000) I implicitly presented the challenge to find orthographies
that provide clear counterexamples to the notion of Consistency.
2. The case of Dutch
This implicit challenge has been taken up by Neijt (this volume), who argues that Dutch
orthography provides several counterexamples to Consistency. Her arguments are presented
in various subsections below. However, rather than restrict myself to her arguments, I also
present other Dutch data that one might be tempted to think constitute counterexamples to
Consistency. In each case, I argue that the problem is only apparent. The conclusion, then, is
that Dutch orthography does not represent a counterexample to Consistency.
I note at the outset that the majority of the data presented here are from Nunn's (1998)
compendious treatment of Dutch orthography.
2.1. Obstruent devoicing
Dutch obstruents are devoiced at the end of words, yet with one class of exceptions this
devoicing is not represented in the orthography. Thus the word huid 'skin' is pronounced
[hoeyt] despite the orthographic <d>, and the word leb 'rennet' is [Ιερ]. The exceptions are
fricatives, specifically /v/ and /z/: these also devoice to, respectively, [f] and [s], yet in this
case the devoicing is represented in the orthography. Thus alongside huizen [hoeyza] 'houses',
one finds huis [hoeys] 'house'. Similarly, one finds leven [leva] 'to live', but (ik) leef [lef] '(I)
live'. Thus we have a case of apparent inconsistency, since we seem to have one and the same
phonological process represented in the orthography for one class of segments and not repre-
sented for another.
Interestingly, Nunn (1998: 54-55) argues for a different account of the spelling of /v/ and
/z/. She notes that the spellings with <£> and <s> show up not only in final position where
they are devoiced, but also in positions where they are voiced: thus leefde [levda] 'lived' and
vreesde [vrezda] 'feared'. Clearly, then, the spelling of underlying /z/ and /v/ must be
governed by other principles than the mere reflection of the surface pronunciation. To account
for this array of facts, Nunn proposes an autonomous spelling rule of spelling devoicing,
which we repeat in (1) below: note that Nunn distinguishes phoneme-to-grapheme rules,
which operate on phonemes and produce grapheme sequences, from autonomous spelling
rules, which operate purely on grapheme sequences and are sensitive to orthographic syllable

38 Richard Sproat
structure. (See Nunn 1998: 118 for a procedural definition of orthographic syllables in
Dutch.)
(1) z^s/_C0]s
v-f/_C0]s
In other words, <z> and <v> are rewritten as <s> and <f> in case they are final in their ortho-
graphic syllable (]s), except for possible intervening consonants. In vreesde the <z> is final in
its orthographic syllable (vreez-) and is thus respelled as <s>. Similarly, in verhuisd 'moved
house' the <z> is followed only by a consonant (<d>) in its orthographic syllable, and is again
spelled as <s>. Thus, an apparent counterexample to Consistency turns out instead to be due
to a somewhat idiosyncratic spelling behavior of underlying Izl and /v/. Basically, the spell-
ings <s> and <f> do not in general represent phonological devoicing. Thus one can in turn
maintain the generalization that final obstruent devoicing is not represented in Dutch ortho-
graphy.
But there remains an apparent problem, since while devoicing is not represented in final
obstruents, it is represented in cases of voicing assimilation with inflectional affixes. Thus the
past tense suffix -d is spelled as <d> when it is phonologically voiced, but as <t> when it is
phonologically voiceless; compare kamde 'combed' with hoopte 'heaped'. Thus, here again,
we appear to have a problem, since we have an instance where a phonological process is
sometimes represented orthographically, and sometimes not.
But what is the evidence that the two processes - final obstruent devoicing and devoicing
of the inflection affix -d - are the same phonological rule? They are surely both instances of
devoicing, but that is where the similarity stops. In the case of final obstruent devoicing, we
have a process where voicing is turned off in due to a following final boundary; in the case of
the affix -d, we have a case where devoicing spreads from a preceding unvoiced sound. In one
case the process can be said to be anticipatory and in the second it is perseverative; and
beyond this, the triggering conditions are different, since in one case an actual preceding
voiceless phoneme is the trigger, whereas in the other case it is simply the position in the
word that triggers the devoicing. One would gain nothing in terms of phonological elegance
by collapsing these two processes into one, and therefore it seems to be a reasonable conjec-
ture that there are really two devoicing processes at play here. (It is perhaps worth pointing
out that there is also no particularly natural connection between the two. It is perfectly possi-
ble to find languages that have voicing assimilation in consonant clusters, but not in word
final position - Serbo-Croatian is one such language4 - as well as languages like Dutch or
Russian, which have both.)
But if the two devoicing processes are really separate, then it seems conceivable that one -
the assimilatory devoicing evidenced in the spelling of -d - might precede the ORL, whereas
the other follows it. If this is the case, then we do not have a problem for Consistency.
4 Wayles Browne, personal communication.

The Consistency of the Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch 39
2.2. Cyclicity in orthography
Nunn (1998: 102-103) discusses evidence for the cyclic application of autonomous spelling
rules in Dutch. The evidence involves the interaction between Orthographic Consonant
Degemination and Orthographic Syllabification. Orthographic Consonant Degemination sim-
plifies doubled consonants that occur within the same orthographic syllable: so verbrand+d
(burn+ed) 'burnt' (adjective) is written <verbrand>. Orthographic Syllabification is fairly
complex, but one consequence of the rule is to split up intervocalic geminate consonants if the
righthand member of the pair could be syllabified to the right: thus, wasster 'washerwoman'
is syllabified as [was]o[ster]a (in this case following the morphological structure of the word
was+ster). Nunn shows that despite their similarity to phonological degemination and syllabi-
fication, these two processes are orthographically based.
Orthographic Syllabification can block Consonant Degemination, as examples like wasster
show: since the two <s>'s are separated into two syllables, one can no longer apply Ortho-
graphic Consonant Degemination. On the other hand, forms like wijste 'wisest', which is
morphologically wijs+sl+e (wise+Superlative+Inflection), show that in some cases Syllabifi-
cation seems not to block Degemination: here the syllabification [wijs]Jste]a would have
been expected, with the concomitant spelling *<wijsste>. Nunn argues that such examples can
be handled if we assume cyclic application of Orthographic Syllabification and Degemina-
tion. In wijste we have just wijs+st on the inner cycle (which does not include the final <e>).
Since there is only one orthographic vowel (<ij>, which counts as a single vowel in Dutch
orthography), Syllabification does not apply here, and Degemination applies to yield wijst. On
the next cycle e is added, and Syllabification applies to yield [wijjjste]σ
Is cyclic application in orthography a problem for Consistency? It would be if the ortho-
graphic cycles had to be built in tandem with phonological cycles. In that case, there would be
no single consistent level for the ORL: rather there would be multiple levels, one for each
cycle.
Nunn's evidence does not seem to require this assumption: we are dealing here with the
cyclic interaction of two orthographic rules, and we have no evidence for a crucial depend-
ence upon phonological cyclicity. Nunn assumes that her phoneme-to-grapheme rules - the
first stage in the mapping from the ORL, as we noted earlier - map from a somewhat abstract
representation of morphologically complex words: her presumed underlying spelling
<wijsste> can only be derived from a phonological representation where one represents both
the /s/ of the root and the /s/ of the suffix ([[[weis]st]a]) rather than a more surface phonologi-
cal representation that represents the effects of phonological degemination (/weista/). We
could therefore map in one step from a phonological representation including morphological
constituency information such as [[[wels]st]a] into an orthographic representation
[[[wijs]st]e], which also includes morphological constituency information. A cyclic applica-
tion of orthographic rules would then proceed on this orthographic representation, independ-
ently of phonology. Thus Nunn's example would not be a problem for Consistency since
under this analysis the ORL is a single level of representation (one where phonological
degemination has not applied), and the cyclicity of the orthographic rules is entirely internal
to the orthography.

40 Richard Sproat
It should be stressed that Nunn's case is the only phenomenon that seems to require a
cyclic treatment in her analysis of the orthographic system of Dutch, an analysis that includes
thirteen autonomous spelling rules (of which these are two) and a couple of hundred pho-
neme-to-grapheme rules. Furthermore, I am aware of no reports of orthographic cyclicity in
other writing systems. At present then, the evidence for cyclicity in orthography seems to be
somewhat sparse.
2.3. The spelling of IM and its relation to stress
Words ending in /i/ in Dutch are typically spelled with <ie>. Examples are olie 'oil', Strategie
'strategy', and fobie 'phobia'. However, when a vowel-initial suffix is added, the spelling of
this /i/ differs depending upon stress placement. If the /i/ is stressed, as in Strategie, then the
spelling <ie> is retained, as shown in (2); here the diaeresis on the plural suffix -en indicates
that this second <e> belongs to a different syllable from the final <e> of the stem In contrast,
if the IM is unstressed, as in olie, then the IM is spelled as , as shown in (3).
(2) strategieen 'strategies', fobieen 'phobias'
(3) olien 'to oil'
Nunn (1998) assumes that the phoneme-to-grapheme rules of Dutch convert all such /i/'s into
<ie>, but that an autonomous spelling rule rewrites <ie> as when preceding a vowel, just
in case the <ie> represents an unstressed syllable:
(4) \ie\ —> / _ V
CONDITION: only in unstressed syllables
(Nunn 1998: 184)
Neijt (this volume) proposes such examples as problems for Consistency. The argument
seems to be that, on the one hand, we are dealing here with an autonomous spelling rule that
operates on letter strings, yet at the same time the rule must make reference to purely phono-
logical information (the stress status of the syllable containing IM). So we appear to require the
rule (Nunn's rule (4) above) to refer simultaneously to two levels of information.
Suppose however that stress information is encoded in the orthographic representation by a
diacritic. That is, the phoneme-to-grapheme encoding rules would represent Strategie as
something like <strateg®ie>, whereas olie would be represented as <©olie>; in this case, the
diacritic © encodes the placement of phonological stress. In this case, the rule in (4) can sim-
ply make reference to the absence of this diacritic:
(5) \ie\ -> /
The diacritic, which of course does not show up in the surface spelling of the word, is then
deleted by rule. Is this approach not unattractive, depending as it does on a representational
'hack'? Perhaps, but it is not clear that it is any less attractive than a condition that requires
one to look simultaneously at the orthography and the phonology.
But perhaps there is an additional problem, namely that given other considerations, the
ORL for Dutch must be at a level that precedes the assignment of lexical stress. In that case,

The Consistency of the Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch 41
there would be no stress information at the relevant phonological level to encode in terms of a
diacritic, and we would be reduced once again to a transderivational condition of the kind that
Nunn assumes. It is by no means clear, however, that this is the case. For one thing, some-
thing must explain the apparently arbitrary stress difference between words like Strategie and
fobie on the one hand, and words like olie on the other. Indeed, Strategie and fobie must
apparently be lexically marked to take final stress, since the normal stress pattern for Dutch
would place stress on the penultimate syllable.5 Given this, then at least for words like Strate-
gie, we would be able to place the diacritic appropriately.
Needless to say, it is also possible that lexical stress assignment precedes the ORL for
Dutch, in which case all stress information is available to the spelling. But in either case, the
autonomous spelling rule that changes <ie> into does not appear to form a counterexam-
ple to Consistency.
2.4. Representation of nasal assimilation
Neijt (this volume) observes that in Dutch (as in English), latinate prefixes ending in nasals,
such as in- assimilate that nasal to the place of articulation of a following consonant. In case
that following consonant is a labial, the assimilation of the prefix is represented in the ortho-
graphy. Thus compare (6) and (7):
(6) inconvenient 'inconvenience'
(7) improductief'unproductive'
On the other hand, native prefixes such as on- do not represent nasal assimilation orthographi-
cally, even though phonetically the nasal may assimilate:
(8) onaardig 'not nice'
(9) onpersoonlijk (*ompersoonlijk) 'impersonal'
Note that the prefix on- in onpersoonlijk may be pronounced [om].
On the face of it then we would appear to have a case where part of the vocabulary (the
latinate part) represents a process orthographically, whereas the same process is not repre-
sented in another part of the vocabulary (the native part) - a clear prima facie counterexample
to Consistency.
The solution to this problem is straightforward, and the solution applies equally well in
Dutch as it does in equivalent cases in English. Although both cases surely involve nasal
assimilation, in the case of latinate prefixes the assimilation is an obligatory morpho-
phonological alternation, whereas in the case of native prefixes, the alternation is an optional
phonetic alternation: while one may pronounce an [m] in onpersoonlijk, it is also possible to
pronounce the nasal with a dental closure, or in other words as an [n]. (Various mechanisms
for encoding this distinction are available; in Lexical Phonology (see, e.g., Mohanan 1986) for
example, the distinction could be handled by assigning latinate nasal assimilation to an early
5 Geert Booij, personal communication, and see (Booij 1999).

42 Richard Sproat
lexical stratum, and native nasal assimilation to either a later lexical stratum or else to the
postlexical component.)
Indeed, not only does latinate in- assimilate phonologically and orthographically before
labials, but it also completely assimilates orthographically and phonologically before IV and
Irl: illegitiem 'illegitimate' and irrelevant 'irrelevant' Again, the facts are identical to those
found in English.6
So we are not dealing here with a problem for Consistency: rather, Dutch orthography
simply represents in the orthography the obligatory assimilations that occur with latinate in-.
At the same time, it fails to represent the later optional - and probably phonetic - assimilation
that one finds in native on-.
2.5. Differential spelling of native and foreign words
Phoneme-to-grapheme rules for native morphemes in Dutch differ from those for non-native
morphemes. For example, lol is invariably spelled as <oo> in native words or words that are
treated as native; thus hoop 'hope', stroop 'syrup', room 'cream'. (This <oo> is changed to
<o> by a later autonomous spelling rule when the vowel is orthographic-syllable final; see
Nunn 1998: 183.) On the other hand, lol in non-native words can be spelled in a variety of
ways: thus we have <o> in depot, <eau> in bureau, and <oa> in goal, among others; see
Nunn (1998: chapter 4, and appendix D) for fiirther discussion.
This might be seen as a problem for Consistency in that two separate portions of the
vocabulary receive differential treatment. On the other hand, this differential treatment does
not constitute evidence that the ORL itself is different for the two portions of the vocabulary:
all it shows is that the phoneme-to-grapheme rules must be sensitive to features of a word's
etymology, something that we must surely assume under any theory of the relation between
linguistic and orthographic form. Note that how such etymological information is 'transmit-
ted' to the orthography is beyond the scope of this discussion: one might assume various
mechanisms, including explicit tagging of etymological features or lexically specified sets of
orthographic rules associated with different etymological groups.7
2.6. The representation of compounds and phrases
Neijt (this volume) notes that Dutch orthography must encode the difference between com-
pounds and phrases: specifically, compounds are written as a single word with no intervening
spaces, whereas the orthographic representation of phrasal constructions includes spaces
between the component words. As a minimal pair, Neijt gives the compound vuilegrond-
affaire 'an affair concerning polluted land' and vuile grondajfaire 'a dirty affair concerning
6 I thank Martin Neef for pointing these examples out to me.
7 In Sproat (2000: Chapter 3), I assumed something akin to the former idea in that I used a feature [+gk] for
English words of Greek origin in order to trigger certain spelling rules, such as <ph> for /C.

The Consistency of the Orthographically Relevant Level in Dutch 43
land'. The former case is presumably represented as the word in (10) and the latter as the
phrase in (11):
(10) [N [N vuile grond] affaire]
(11) [A vuile [N grond affaire] ]
These facts are supposedly a problem for Consistency, since the orthography must be sensi-
tive to information at both the lexical and at the phrasal 'levels'.
There is, of course, a coniiision of the notion 'level' here, since Consistency specifically
refers to level in the sense of stage of a derivation, not level in the sense of level in a hierar-
chy. But over and above that, there is clearly no problem here: the linguistic representation of
a construction at the ORL presumably includes information, such as that shown in (10)-(11),
on whether the construction in question is a single word or a phrase. Crucially, we assume
that the ORL for a construction includes all the information available at that particular level of
derivation for the construction in question. Thus, if we are writing a sentence, then all of the
morphemes that comprise that sentence are present at the ORL for that sentence, though their
final surface phonological form may not yet have been derived. Orthographic encoding rules
can therefore make use of that information. In the case of Dutch, spaces are used in the ortho-
graphic encoding to delimit words, and are not used within words, where 'word' includes
relatively large constructions such as noun compounds. In English, things work differently,
since compounds consisting of more than two basic words are typically 'broken up' in writ-
ing: English orthographic encoding rules thus must be sensitive to the size of the construction
being written. But in any event, all of the linguistic information necessary to make the correct
orthographic decision in Dutch is present at the ORL, and thus the distinction between words
and compounds and their differential treatment in Dutch orthography does not pose a problem
for Consistency.
2.7. Where is the ORL for Dutch?
From the discussion above it seems that we can in feet maintain the assumption that the ORL
for Dutch is a consistent level of phonological representation. The question then arises of
where that level is. This is easy to answer, by considering the set of phonological processes
that are represented orthographically, or have an orthographic effect, versus those that are not
represented orthographically. These break down as follows:
(12) Phonological processes preceding the ORL
Latinate nasal assimilation (Section 2.4)
(Lexical) stress marking (Section 2.3)
Perseverative devoicing (Section 2.1)
(13) Phonological processes following the ORL
(Optional) nasal assimilation with native prefixes (Section 2.4)
Final obstruent devoicing (Section 2.1)

44 Richard Sproat
Thus, the ORL for Dutch orthography must be at a level where the processes listed in (12)
have applied but where those listed in (13) have not.
3. Final thoughts: why Consistency?
Even granted that the ORL can be shown to be a consistent level for Dutch, one may legiti-
mately ask the question of why one would expect Consistency to hold in the first place. Why
should an orthography pick a single level of phonological representation to represent? After
all, orthographic systems are artificial constructs, so the framers of such constructs are in
principle not governed by any notions of linguistic naturalness. It may well be true, as I pro-
posed in the introduction, that Consistency is the simplest constrained theory of the relation
between linguistic form and the orthographic form that represents it, but why would one
expect an artefact to be governed by such considerations?
The answer to this question is that an orthographic system must be used by the literate por-
tion of a language community, and in order for it to be used it should ideally be as natural as
possible. It is certainly possible to design a system that fails Consistency. One might for
example (to build on a hypothetical case already given in the introduction) have decided that
final devoicing should be represented orthographically in nouns in Dutch, but not in verbs.
Thus one would spell hond 'dog' as <hont>, but (ik) heb '(I) have' would continued to be
spelled <heb>. But while such a system could surely be designed, two questions immediately
come up. Would such a system be readily accepted by the literate population: that is, would
they try to immediately simplify the system to bring it more in line with a reasonable - and
consistent - analysis? Secondly, if the system were adopted, would it lead to spelling pronun-
ciations, where speakers began to make a phonological distinction between those words
where final devoicing is represented, and those where it is not? After all, as Wells (1982)
cogently observes, literate speakers often base their conscious beliefs about the pronuncia-
tions of words on the spellings of those words: naive English speakers frequently believe that
tow and toe are pronounced differently because they are spelled differently. It is in principle a
small step from such beliefs to their implementation in the form of spelling pronunciations,
whereby the orthographically distinct words become phonologically distinct. Thus it may
behoove a spelling system to be linguistically sensible, or else over time users of the system
will make it so. Consistency is merely one way of being linguistically sensible.8
I wish to thank Martin Neef and Anneke Neijt for helpful discussion.

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Title: Mar sanguigno (Offerta al nostro buon vecchio Dio)
Author: Guido Milanesi
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAR SANGUIGNO
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Mar sanguigno
(OFFERTA AL NOSTRO BUON VECCHIO DIO)

GUIDO MILANESI
Mar sanguigno
(OFFERTA AL NOSTRO BUON VECCHIO DIO)
EDITORI — ALFIERI & LACROIX — MILANO

Proprietà artistica e letteraria riservata agli editori.
Copyright 1918 by Alfieri e Lacroix — Milano.
Stabilimento Alfieri e Lacroix — Milano, Via Mantegna
6.

INDICE

LU SCÏÒ
(LA TETRA LEGGENDA DELL'ADRIATICO).
It is an ancient Mariner....
(Coleridge ).
Sono intorno a me otto uomini vecchissimi che il mare da lungo
tempo ripudiò. Da tuguri pieni di bimbi e d'immagini sacre, da
giacigli posti tra reti rotte e detriti di barca, questi che non più altro
chiedono alla vita che pace e sole, sono stati scovati ad uno ad uno
con la promessa di un po' di vino; e col loro passo che non ha più
fretta hanno varcata la soglia di questa villa seguendo docilmente il
domestico attraverso il giardino e venendo a sedersi in silenzio nella
stanza mia.
Le finestre son chiuse. Una pioggia orizzontale scroscia sui cristalli
col selvaggio impeto delle pioggie di novembre, mentre le invisibili
mani del vento scuotono, curvano e dilaniano le cime degli alberi,
facendo sbalzar pazzamente la luce dell'interno lungo i toni di una
scala cinerea. Così nell'ambiente a poco a poco s'aggrava un odore
grasso e complesso sul quale pesce tabacco e catrame, aspri fattori
primi, sormontano un odore più blando di chiesa troppo piena e
quello indefinibile e più repulsivo della stoffa dei poveri, inumidita.
Ecco dunque un ben strano consesso intorno a me. Sono carni
risecchite e scolpite dal sole e dagli anni, crani che appena fissati
rivelano il teschio, occhi rossi, socchiusi dall'aver visto troppe cose,
mani deformi e tremolanti che si agitano impercettibilmente nel
silenzio dell'attesa: tutta una rovina organica irrimediabile e pronta a

sparire. Ma per contrasto le alte spalliere delle poltrone damascate in
verde cupo danno ad ogni corpo uno sfondo solenne; ed allora
ognuno di questi vecchi che i miei sguardi investigano, perde per me
il suo aspetto misero e m'apparisce come in trionfo. Un capriccio
travestì e deformò dei dogi; i più vecchi dogi d'una Venezia
stracciona...; ma dogi sempre...: chè se dalla scolorita giubba di uno
manca ogni bottone, se uno squarcio riaperto nella mal fatta
ricucitura mostra il gramo ginocchio di un altro, se un terzo sporge
un braccio anchilosato da una manica sfilacciata, e se un altro, due
altri hanno i piedi nudi, tutti comandarono navi ed uomini e tutti dal
Cònero al Gargano dominarono l'Adriatico rastrellando pesce, questi
analfabeti scienziati del mare, i cui sguardi flosci ora convergono nel
mio come raggiera al centro.
Ci guardiamo e tacciamo. L'idea dei tanti anni qui dentro compressi
mi opprime. Io quasi non oso sospingere il mio pensiero vivo tra
tanti cadaveri di pensiero sepolti in questi crani; ed in me
sopravviene come un'improvvisa fanciullezza sulla quale incombe di
nuovo quel «rispetto dei grandi» che da bambini ci faceva così umili.
Far parlare costoro, raccogliere le loro leggende mi sembra ad un
tratto una cosa impossibile. E poi, sarò compreso?
— Neanche per sogno! — mi dice nettamente un mio amico di qui
che secondando il mio desiderio ha saputo scovare questi otto vecchi
— ciò che resta dei più celebri marinai del paese — e si è offerto da
interprete. — Bisogna lasciarli parlare come credono, partendo da un
argomento qualsiasi e spingendoli a poco a poco dove si vuole.
Vedrà che faremo presto. Diriga loro una domanda a caso... ma che
susciti il loro interesse... Cerchi un po'...
Oh, allora è presto fatto. Interessar dei vecchi? Chi molto ha speso,
pensa spesso a ciò che gli resta: qui, il vissuto e il da vivere.
Scaldarli un po'? Basta chieder loro, per esempio, chi sia il più
giovane...
Questa mia prima domanda, tradotta, suscita infatti un confuso coro
di denegazioni discrete, accentuate da una mimica a scatti come di

mal congiunte membra di legno: cercar di precisare la propria età li
mette di buon umore, li ravviva comicamente: son risatine catarrose,
titubanze, brevi scoppi di tosse...; ed anche colui che viene
finalmente designato da tutti come il più giovane, sembra schermirsi
da un fatto buffo che a torto gli venga attribuito: e ride scoprendo le
caverne dei denti.
Ride perchè ha settantadue anni. Si chiama Antò, detto Picchinsù: e
il cognome è inutile. Dice di conoscermi perchè un figlio di sua figlia,
ora morta, fu imbarcato con me sulla Varese e per i miei buoni uffici
fu promosso sottonocchiere. Può darsi.
Ma ce n'è un altro che ride di più; Isè (Giuseppe) detto «La Botta» (il
rospo), rattrappito infatti da un troncone d'antenna che gli cadde
addosso in una notte di tempesta. Qualche parola che io non
comprendo s'intercala nell'espressione del suo riso.
— Dice — mi spiega l'amico — che Antò è «nu frighì» (un ragazzo)
perchè lui invece ne ha ottantasette...
Ottantasette! Un breve calcolo mentale scolpisce nella mia mente la
cifra 1826 e mi porta a riflettere su una circostanza naturale e che
senza nesso logico, ora mi apparisce come assurda: e cioè che
quando nacque questo Isè «la botta», l'Aquila Cörsa era sparita da
appena cinque anni...
Ma tutti gli avvenimenti della terra si fransero contro la prora della
paranza di costui. Infatti alla domanda scherzosa se egli ricordi di
aver sentito nella sua adolescenza nominare un certo Napoleone
Bonaparte, l'uomo corruga le bianche sopracciglia, pensa, si sforza,
ride... Se l'ha sentito nominare! Sicuro. Si ricorda benissimo di un
tale che si chiamava Napoleò ma che aveva però un altro
soprannome: non Bonaparte. Era padre di tre figlie... — come
tradurre la rude parola sua? — uomaiole, le quali vagavano a sera
per la pineta lungo la spiaggia, deviando dalla casa e dalla moglie i
marinai ritornati dalla pesca...
— Isè, questo non c'interessa — interrompe il mio amico. — Non
vogliamo sapere questo, Isè.

Ma il vecchio, preso ad un tratto dal suo ricordo risvegliato, non
bada più a nulla, e testardo come bimbo continua:
— ... tre figlie che tutti i marinai alternativamente prendevano e
maltrattavano: e che poi — prosegue abbassando repentinamente la
voce — si rividero sempre dentro «lu scïò»...
— In che cosa? — chiedo stupito.
— Zitto! — Mi sussurra l'amico illuminandosi tutto. — Il caso ci aiuta.
Mi pare che ci siamo.
Un silenzio: un silenzio intessuto dal sibilo dei respiri. Ma perchè tutti
questi vecchi mi fissano, sorpresi alla loro volta?
— Lu scïò! — mi si risponde in coro e con un tono confinante col
rimprovero, così come merita la mia inverosimile ignoranza, non
dissipata certo da una tale conferma.
— Ma guarda questi giovani! — sembra mi dicano otto paia di occhi
divenuti improvvisamente vividi nel fondo delle occhiaie — Hanno
carta e penna davanti, interrogano, pare che sappiano tutto, e poi...
— Parla tu, Isè — dicono varie voci, stridule, roche, bambinesche,
sibilanti. Spiega tu a «lu patrò»
[1] che è.
Ma l'uomo esita, sputa... repentinamente illividito. Con un gesto
quasi incosciente leva un braccio per indicarmi le finestre su cui
l'acqua scroscia... I ricordi napoleonici svaniscono d'incanto avanti
alla strana parola, al terrore, al gesto di questo povero rimasuglio di
celebre marinaio.
— Come? — insisto. — Vuol dire dunque tempesta questa tua
parola?
No: è evidente che l'idea della tempesta raccorcia l'altra, la vera,
tanto è amaro il sorriso che l'accoglie.
— Più, più... — brontola il vegliardo fissando i cristalli. — È cosa più
temibile, più spaventosa...

— E parla dunque! — gli dice l'amico. — Tu sei il più vecchio e tutti
sanno che ne hai viste e fatte d'ogni colore. Ma che cos'hai? — gli
chiede, vedendolo chinar la testa tra le mani.
— Non si parla di queste cose, patrò; non se ne parla mai: e
specialmente quando il tempo è cattivo: come oggi. Sono anni che
non ne parlo più — risponde con fioca voce il vecchio. — Porta
sfortuna.
— Sta a vedere che il famoso Isè «la botta» ha paura! Come le
donne!
— Chi, io? — esclama il vecchio in un subito sussulto. — Patrò, Isè
ha paura soltanto del vino cattivo. Quando non si vive più in mare
«non c'è più bisogno» d'aver paura di niente. In mare, santi e
madonne, e in terra, vino.
E rivolgendosi a me: — lè bune lu vì tue, patrò? (È buono il tuo vino,
signore?)
E ad un vago cenno d'assentimento: — Mbè — dice —: Nu lu sci
viste maie tu, lu scïò? (Non hai mai visto, tu, lo scïò?)
— Mai.
Benchè io appartenga alla marina da guerra, sono di razza diversa e
bassissima. Me lo dicono otto bocche mute, contorte da un ghigno di
commiserazione.
L'abbagliante luce di un fulmine, seguìta da un fragore infernale, mi
fissa per un istante gli otto vecchi in questa loro espressione, prima
che una semi-oscurità li affondi di nuovo nelle loro spalliere verdi.
— Non l'interrompa più — mi consiglia l'amico. — Le tradurrò alla
meglio le frasi difficili. Le riempia, le aggiusti lei....
* * *
Quando innumerevoli stuoli di nuvole scure sembrano
improvvisamente divenir pesanti e scendono e s'accatastano e

s'addensano, premendo sull'orizzonte come alpi di piombo, già
fredde e compatte in basso, ma ancora tormentate sulle vette da
mal spenta fusione, l'Adriatico spiana ogni sua onda e s'illividisce
tutto per un immenso brivido che gli porta via ogni colore.
Le vele gialle e rosse delle paranze sciamate tutt'intorno al cerchio
eterno che stringe l'esistenza dei marinai, prima risaltano di più e poi
divorate da una tinta di inchiostro, spariscono a poco a poco. E se
allora una nuvola unica sconvolta da un vento altissimo si distacca
dal fondo e si mette a correre essa sola, tutta orlata di grigio nel
profilo mutevole, e accenna membra di chimere, code
paleontologiche e tentacoli mostruosi, le barche immobili sembrano
gravitare di più nel mare immobile, acqua, legname ed uomini,
materia e spirito stringendosi assieme per lo stesso spavento.
Nell'aria morta, solcata da fulmini lontanissimi, lenti volano i gabbiani
esagerando il bianco delle loro ali sullo sfondo nero; ma non gridano
più; non possono gridar più; s'è prodotto un fatto soprannaturale;
essi hanno improvvisamente cambiato natura.
Come tutto il creato, d'altronde. Ciò che apparisce come cortina di
montagne nere, non è più formato da nuvole ma da una ressa di
miliardi d'anime accorse da ogni mondo e compresse l'una sull'altra
in tal maniera che forarne lo strato è impossibile; perchè il mare
deve rimanere inesorabilmente chiuso attorno alle paranze. Esso è
divenuto ad un tratto, rotonda, sterminata platea di giustizia.
E quella nuvola solitaria che spazia da sovrana su tutte le altre e che
ha raccolto ogni tentacolo per aprirsi in alto come coppa diabolica ed
allungare verso il mare una sola, acuta, serpeggiante propagine, non
è tromba marina, non è meteora; essa è fatta di morti...; — quelli a
cui noi marinai facemmo torto in vita — dice Isè — è spada; spada di
Dio; ed il suo nome è Scïò.
················

L'uomo si ferma ansante sulla parola come per accentuarne la
solennità. Mi guarda a lungo. Chiede da bere e vuota d'un sorso uno
dei bicchieri di vino che il domestico ha preparati su un tavolo.
Qualcuno lo imita timidamente: poi tutti vogliono bere e la loro ressa
fa pena... Eccoli di nuovo ai loro posti, più soddisfatti, più aperti alle
confidenze, come dimostrano i sorrisi sdentati, gli occhietti ravvivati
e il coro delle raucedini.
Ah, dunque tutto ciò mi interessa molto? Stranezze di giovane: da
giovane che scrive...
— Avanti! — incita il mio amico in tono impaziente.
················
Ma in questa turba di morti si mescolano anche gli spiriti dei nemici
vivi e di tutti coloro che vogliono nuocere ai marinai; è il demonio
che ve l'incastra.
— Diamine!
— Che? Si può domandarlo a Silvie, «lu patrò della paranza de lu
Sindache». Costui era riuscito con raggiri a soppiantare nel comando
della paranza un marinaio carico di famiglia e che quasi ne morì di
dolore. In mare, venne lo Scïò. Lo spaventoso dito nero che fa
sprizzare e ribollire l'acqua non appena la tocchi, si mise a girare
intorno alla paranza stringendo gradatamente le sue spire e
circondandola come con un muro di zampilli bianchi altissimi.
Improvvisamente si volse verso la poppa, dove Silvie, al timone,
tremava. La barra fu spezzata e gli agugliotti di ferro si torsero:
preso da un turbine di spuma, l'uomo fu gettato sul ponte; e
cadendo col viso in alto, vide trasvolare vicino a sè il volto ghignante
del nemico, mentre si sentiva strappare presto presto a manate
feroci tutti i capelli. E allora svenne... e fu calvo per sempre. Sci
capite, patrò? (Hai capito, signore?).
················

Sì, nello Scïò sono anche i vivi, non v'è dubbio. Infatti...
— ... Infatti — interrompe bruscamente un tale che ha un cranio
d'avvoltoio e si dimena sulla poltrona per improvvisa ilarità — io
gliela feci bella a Nazarè lu sborgnò (l'ubriacone) quando per avergli
dato dei pugni all'uscita dalla messa a causa di una certa Cuncè
(Concetta), mi apparve davanti nello Scïò a dieci miglia da terra, tra
Grottammare e Pedaso. Ah! — prosegue soffocato da un riso che gli
scopre le gengive violacee — questo gli feci!... Ed il suo braccio
s'agita in aria per un gesto infame. — Questo! E come sparì subito!
Subito sparì!... Ah! Ah!
Strangolato dalla tosse, l'uomo che ha interrotto si riaccascia. Ridono
tutti. Un leggero freddo mi prende. E l'altro continua...
················
Passano nello Scïò uomini, donne, bambini. Gridano disperatamente
e la loro voce unita forma l'urlo della raffica. Sono vestiti di bianco e
s'avvinghiano talmente tra loro da comporre un'unica colonna che
dalla superficie dell'acqua s'alza, s'alza, s'allarga e si perde nel cielo,
nel grigio delle nuvole. E tutta la colonna turbina su sè stessa come
fosse un asse, ma un asse molle che possa inflettersi, oscillare,
raddrizzarsi, fremere, spostarsi parallelamente a sè stesso con
velocità prodigiosa.
E nulla le resiste. Ciò che una suprema giustizia decreta, è compìto
dallo Scïò con precisione matematica. A Porto Recanati vuota dei loro
equipaggi due paranze nuove e ne uccide gli uomini, ma restituisce
intatte le due navicelle al loro proprietario, arenandogliele su soffice
letto di sabbia. A Porto San Giorgio inghiotte il solo «patrò» di
un'altra paranza, sradicandolo dalla sartia alla quale s'era
abbarbicato; ma non torce un capello a nessun altro. A San
Benedetto del Tronto succhia un giovane da una barca e lo trascina
in aria con sè. Mille braccia morte lo sospendono, lo stringono, lo
strozzano...; e vien ritrovato malmenato cadavere sul declivio del
monte di Presiccie tra Grottammare e San Benedetto.

Ed una barca segnata a nero dallo Scïò è rinvenuta carica di sassi
alle foci dell'Albula, mentre tutto il suo equipaggio si salva. E di un
paio di paranze intente alla pesca, una sola ne prende che per
«patrò» aveva tal Tommaso Spazzafumo, uomo perverso, annegato
senza traccia insieme a tre suoi figli...
È dunque inesorabile lo Scïò, ma non eccede e non isbaglia. Questo
mai.
* * *
Chi si sente colpevole, chi ha nella coscienza i carboni accesi del
rimorso, può sperar grazia dallo Scïò raccomandandosi a Dio,
promettendo pentimenti, risarcimenti, futura vita d'espiazione?
No; non può sperar nulla da Dio. Lo Scïò è già giustizia lanciata, è
già irrevocabile volontà di Dio; non può più fermarsi; deve giungere
come fiume alla foce, deve cadere come per legge di gravità devono
cadere i pesi. Non c'è che un'unica via di scampo, ma richiede
circostanze eccezionali e coinvolge la dannazione. Chi l'usa è
irrimediabilmente preda del demonio. Il suo corpo vive ancora sulle
paranze, getta le reti, serra o borda le vele, gira gli argani, ala le
cime, parla, si nutre, avvista le terre e i fari lontani, ma la sua anima
brucia nelle fiamme eterne e si contorce tra tutti gli spasimi promessi
dalle varie religioni, tutte ugualmente prodighe in questo.
Ed ecco ora che cosa necessiti per fermare uno Scïò. Bisogna che a
bordo vi sia un marinaio «primo nato» in famiglia e che questi
possegga un lungo affilatissimo coltello da beccaio. Egli deve
conoscere le misteriose parole che «offendono Iddio» e che, dettate
dal demonio al primo marinaio che navigò l'Adriatico, attraverso una
sottile fila d'uomini depositari del segreto, di generazione in
generazione pervennero a lui. Egli è dunque elemento prezioso e
rarissimo e generalmente non rivela sè stesso che al momento
stringente del bisogno. Allora il denaro compenserà la salvezza della
paranza e l'intercessione della Madonna di Loreto, scongiurata nei
pellegrinaggi di settembre, ridarà forse pace all'anima compromessa.

Al sopraggiungere dello Scïò, l'iniziato resterà solo in coperta, fronte
alla colonna d'anime turbinanti e coltello denudato alla mano. Poscia,
gridando le parole magiche che sa e frammischiandole a bestemmie
oscene, taglierà più volte «nella» meteora muovendo
orizzontalmente il braccio avanti a sè e tenendo il corpo chino.
Basta. Come fossero state tolte ad un pilastro le pietre di base,
l'orribile turbine crollerà, si dissolverà, sparpaglierà per il cielo le
anime a gruppi spauriti che chiederan rifugio alle nuvole. Un trionfo,
dunque: nel quale però arderà in un sol tratto tutta la fede cristiana
del tagliatore, lasciando cenere.
E non si può nemmeno presagire con certezza che cosa possa
derivare da un simile atto sacrilego.
— No: non si può... — dice Isè «la botta» mentre il fragore d'un
fulmine copre la sua debole voce. — Beatissima Vergine della Santa
Casa, proteggetemi voi! — aggiunge tremando, ed accompagnando
la sua invocazione col gesto cattolico dello scongiuro, accennato dal
pollice destro trascorrente giù dalla fronte alle labbra. Un nuovo
lampo lo illumina nella maschera livida, resa spaventevole dagli occhi
vitrei e dalla bocca socchiusa.
— Da bere! — dice ansando. E dell'altro vino tracannato in fretta,
passa a larghi sorsi visibili nella sua gola flaccida.
Ciò sembra rasserenarlo.
— Via! — mormora tentando un abbozzo di sorriso e accennando un
gesto inteso a scacciare il proprio terrore. — Maledetta la vecchiaia e
viva il vino!
— Perchè hai detto che non si può prevedere che cosa avvenga dopo
tagliato uno Scïò? — gli chiede il mio amico, senza dargli requie.
— Ah! Ah! — ghigna il vecchio esaltandosi improvvisamente. — Tu
hai detto che Isè la Botta ha paura? Ragazzo, ragazzo bello, sta a
sentire se ha paura.
... Io ero tagliatore di Scïò... Già: proprio! — dice, squadrando i
vecchi ad uno ad uno come a sedar la paurosa meraviglia che si

disegna in ogni sguardo. — Io ero tagliatore di Scïò: e alla burrasca
del due di novembre...
— Come? — interrompo — è una data fissa?
— Si capisce. Tutti gli anni c'è la burrasca del giorno dei morti. Non
ne abbiamo due oggi? Embè? Guarda là...
Indica una finestra, mi scruta con commiserazione quasi irritata, e
prosegue:
— ... e alla burrasca del due di novembre, a bordo della «Marietta
bella», fui richiesto dell'opera mia. Tutto andò bene. Però la bora ci
costrinse a buttarci verso la costa dalmata e prendemmo ridosso a
Fiume. Pesce non ne avevamo, perchè al largo il mare furioso ci
aveva impedito di gettar le reti, e poi perchè nella zona di calma
vicina a terra, la gettata non diede che ossa di morto...
— Che?
— Auff! Sì. Ossa di morto. Nu lu saie, patrò? Quando si pesca nella
notte dei morti, non si trovano che coccie (teschi) e ossa...
— Amen! Sta bene.
— ... Avevamo dunque ben poco da fare a Fiume; ed io con le
cinquanta lire guadagnate per il taglio dello Scïò, me ne andai a
terra per disperdere alcune immagini nere che mi giravano in testa.
Orribili immagini! — dice come parlando a sè stesso — perchè...
Ma uno di quegli improvvisi silenzi dei vecchi nei quali pare spegnersi
per sincope la loro volontà e che un brontolio incomprensibile
conclude, gli torce le noccute mani e non ci spiega questo perchè.
E per la terza volta l'uomo — il resto d'uomo — chiede forza al vino.
Io non so più se abbia maggiore interesse per me la narrazione o il
narratore stesso. I pensieri dei giovani sono brevi, sinceri e massicci:
quelli dei vecchi, lunghi, complicati e minuti. L'anima di chi troppo ha
vissuto è rimasta forata da gallerie tortuose, franate qua e là e nelle
quali la luce non può più penetrare.

Ora io studio questo povero essere che mi sta davanti e lo seguo, sì,
nelle sue oscillazioni dalla spavalderia all'abbattimento, ma è come
indagassi nel grigio d'una nebbia. Che cosa sono queste pause,
attorno alle quali, come attorno a rocce, ribolle e si frange la stanca
corrente del suo ricordo? Di quale impossibile minaccia trema? Ah!
ogni vecchio è veramente problema già risoluto ma del quale si è
perduta per sempre la risoluzione!...
Ecco: la corrente si riforma, s'avvia... Il tagliatore di Scïò ridiviene
sprezzante, parla di nuovo...
— ... Tutto voglio raccontare a questi ragazzi curiosi, tutto. Paura
io?... Appena disceso sulla banchina, un uomo che non avevo visto
mai mi venne incontro con la mano tesa. «Siamo entrambi marinai»
— disse «Andiamo insieme». Certo che era marinaio: vestiva come
me; e se non era proprio di San Benedetto del Tronto, doveva esser
di qui vicino perchè parlava quasi come me. Ed era cieco da un
occhio per causa recente, giacchè intorno alle palpebre aveva del
sangue appena ristagnato.
Andammo insieme.
— Da dove vieni? — gli chiesi.
— Da un paese tanto lontano e che tu non conosci.
— E dove vai?
— Ritornerò laggiù.
— La tua paranza?
— Si chiama «Niente».
Tra noi marinai non usa farsi tante domande. Viviamo tutti nello
stesso modo. Oggi si è qua, domani là... Ci è indifferente dove si sia
e dove si vada. E poi questo sconosciuto si mostrava così amabile
con me da rendere inopportuna ogni diffidenza. Mi offrì sigari e
slivovitz senza voler accettare nulla da me, cosa che però
m'annoiava, tanto più che col mio biglietto in tasca mi sentivo ricco.

Verso sera, stanchi, andammo a pranzare insieme. Bevemmo molto:
e quando si trattò di pagare:
— Sta a me — dissi io.
— Niente affatto. — mi rispose. — Devo pagare io.
— Credi forse che io non abbia denari? Guarda qua. — E misi sul
tavolo le cinquanta lire.
— Già sapevo che tu le avevi. Riprendile: rimettile in tasca.
— Tu devi essere ubbriaco. Come lo sapevi?
State a sentire che cosa mi rispose. Mi rispose così:
— Marinaio: io passai nel vento ieri vicino alla tua paranza e ti vidi
col coltello in mano. Io udii le parole tue e ricevetti io il primo colpo
che vibrasti... Ero nello Scïò, morto tra migliaia di morti. Tu mi colpisti
qui in quest'occhio: guarda: questa è ferita tua. Non l'avrei ricevuta
se tu avessi dette esattamente le parole che «offendono Iddio»; ma
non fa niente: bene o male hai distrutto lo Scïò che mi trascinava da
anni. Ora sono anima libera e il vento non mi piglia più. Chiedi alla
tua Madonna di Loreto che ti protegga. Addio.
E vicino al suo posto, ad un tratto, vuoto, rimasero dieci lire.
Venne il cameriere: un biondo con gli occhi chiari, viso largo e i baffi
all'ingiù.
— Paga lui? — chiese. — Devo dargli il resto. Dov'è andato?
Che dovevo rispondere?
— In Paradiso — gli dissi.
Sbagliai. «All'inferno!» dovevo dire. Io avevo mangiato e bevuto col
demonio. Ero dannato.
L'uomo biondo si mise a ridere e mi chiamò ubbriacone. — Canaglia!
— gli dissi io. — Canaglie siete voialtri marinai «dell'altra riva!» — mi
ribattè lui. — Ah, per l'anima di tutti i Sambenedettesi che s'è pigliati
il mare, tò, eccoti un regalo dell'altra riva! — urlai: ed afferrata pel
collo la bottiglia dell'acqua che era piena, gliela spezzai in testa.

Prima spalancò gli occhi, poi li richiuse a poco a poco, aprì la bocca,
mi chiamò assassino e cadde.
Venne gente: tirai pugni, mi feci largo, fuggii...: la notte e il diavolo
mi aiutarono...; giunsi a bordo salvo e il padrone della «Marietta
bella» che era un buon uomo, salpò. C'era ancora la «bora», ma
soffiava in poppa e la mattina dopo la paranza era qua.
— Ma, e lo uccidesti? — gli chiede concitatamente il mio amico.
— Si capisce! — esclama il vecchio con quell'intonazione che si dà
nel rispondere ad una inutile domanda dei bambini.
— Come lo sapesti?
L'uomo s'interrompe di nuovo e piega la testa sul petto, respirando
forte: si ode il sibilo dell'aria che si apre il varco nei suoi bronchi
aridi. E, come per improvviso sonno, chiude gli occhi mentre le sue
labbra s'agitano senza suono quasi per bassa preghiera. Finalmente
con una voce lontana e triste come quella che i cattivi sogni
prestano alle visioni d'incubo:
— Oh bella! Come l'ho saputo! — dice senza riaprir gli occhi e rialzar
il capo. — Tutta la mia vita ho lottato con lui... Il suo posto negli Scïò
era in basso, vicino all'acqua: sempre lì stava: ed il suo viso tondo e
gialliccio aveva gli occhi spalancati come quando io gli tirai... e
risaltava su quello di tutti gli altri morti come una luna gialla tra lune
d'argento. Egli veniva nel vento, dritto verso di me: sempre: e
ghignando alzava le braccia per indicarmi sul cranio una chiazza
sanguinosa da cui uscivano fiocchi bianchi di cervello. Io dovevo far
presto a tagliare nello Scïò col coltello, se no seguiva una cosa
strabiliante; lui si metteva a parlare ed io dovevo rimanere come
incatenato ad ascoltarlo, senza forza per pronunziare le parole che
offendono Iddio e fanno crollare le colonne di morti.
Una notte di tempesta, venne tenendo un bambino pallidissimo nelle
braccia e mi urlò che glielo avevo ucciso io. Malato, rimasto senza
padre e solo al mondo, nessuno aveva potuto comprare a questo
bambino le medicine di cui aveva bisogno... E da allora vennero
sempre insieme. Il piccolo teneva la testa sul petto del grande e

turbinavano tutti e due presto presto, disegnando spirali luminose
come quelle che si vedono nei fuochi d'artificio: una larga ed una
stretta, ma di colore diverso ed impossibili ad esser fissate.
E sì! Avevano un bel turbinare, gridare, minacciare: io li respinsi
sempre, vinsi sempre...
Isè la Botta rialza il capo, riapre gli occhi, beve ancora.
— Stu vi iecche iè bbune prassà (questo vino è molto buono) —
dice, mentre si riaccascia nella sua posizione di sonno.
E quasi balbettando, con la sua voce che dà i brividi, prosegue:
— Una volta sola non arrivai a tempo perchè ero troppo stanco e
dormivo sotto il ponte. Allora si presero la vela, spezzarono l'antenna
e quando corsi su, me ne buttarono un troncone nella schiena. Ma
benchè ferito potei ancora ricacciarli indietro e rider loro in faccia.
— Ridi, ridi pure! — mi gridò il morto volando via. — E vivi! Devi
vivere una lunga vita infernale! Dovrai sempre tremare: ci vedrai
sempre, in ogni nuvola e in ogni sogno; voleremo nelle pallide albe e
nei rossi tramonti; dovunque qualche cosa scintilli rivedrai i miei
occhi dilatati; ogni cosa purpurea sarà sangue mio; il vento avrà la
mia voce, la luna il mio viso, la pioggia le mie lagrime; ed il rumore
del tuo passo farà rinascere dal suolo la mia perenne maledizione.
Vivi! ti prenderemo quando sarai tanto vecchio da non ricordar più le
parole del diavolo.
— Ah! — sogghigna Isè senza riaprire gli occhi. — S'era dimenticato
due cose: il vino e la Madonna di Loreto. Nel vino non ho mai visto
niente, e andando ogni settembre in pellegrinaggio alla Santa Casa,
ho avuto molti anni di tranquillità. Rosciole (triglie), mugelli (cefali),
seccie (seppie), storiò (storioni) e merluzzi mi hanno fatto festa
attorno. Voialtri dicevate, eh Antò? eh Giuà? (Giovanni) che me li
mandava il demonio... Non è vero: perchè anche dopo le dodici
messe privilegiate che ho fatte dire a Loreto, il pesce è venuto lo
stesso. Dunque non è vero.

— E nun li sci riviste più? (Non li hai rivisti più?) — gli chiede un
vecchio che per l'enorme cranio lucido, tramato di venette azzurre
ricorda il San Simone del Guercino nella Cena in Emaus.
Io guardo questo vecchio, l'unico che interloquisca nel terrifico
racconto, ed una cosa mi sorprende subito: l'aria di perfetta
indifferenza che egli e tutti gli altri dimostrano per i fatti uditi. Non
un accenno di meraviglia, non una sorpresa. È come se ascoltassero
la lettura di un Vangelo irrefutabile, da troppe generazioni accettato,
per essere discusso.
È il Verbo; è la Verità. Solo la mia stupefazione è illogica dunque: e
certo l'uomo che ha rivolta quella domanda non ha ubbidito a
nessun movente preciso; egli s'è soltanto annoiato di rimaner
sempre zitto: ecco tutto.
Ed è illogico anche che io mi sorprenda della risata clamorosa,
fragorosa che gli risponde, mentre un tuono lunghissimo che rialza la
voce più volte prima di spegnersi brontolando, fa fremere noi, pareti
e cristalli.
Perchè ride così Isè la Botta? È forse il vino che gli sconvolge il
cervello, gli spalanca l'antro della bocca e ne fa sgorgare un rivoletto
di saliva bavosa? Perchè s'alza in piedi aggrappandosi ai bracciuoli
della poltrona?
— No, che non li ho rivisti più — urla tra una risata e l'altra,
cercando soverchiare col proprio urlo il fragore del tuono — perchè
io, Isè la Botta, so ancora le parole del diavolo. Io me ne rido! tanto
che quest'anno i denari pronti per il pellegrinaggio a Loreto me li son
bevuti!... Ho ottantasette anni! Chi mi ha voluto male è crepato! E
voglio arrivare a cento... A cento...!
Sugli ultimi echi del tuono la sua risata sinistra risorge, cala, si fonde
e svanisce.
Ma ad un tratto la pioggia cessa e le cime degli alberi rimangono
immobili. Sopravviene come una notte improvvisa: poi s'ode un
rumore crescente che pare lo scrosciar dei sassi spinti dalla piena; e
qualche cosa che fischia, flagella, urla, s'avvicina a noi sbattendo le

gelosie delle finestre e trascinando via le tegole delle case vicine.
Eccola, arriva la cosa terrifica: tutta la villa ne è scossa come per
l'urto d'un'onda mostruosa: e, non reggendo all'impeto, tra il fragore
delle porte che si chiudono violentemente, tra i fischi d'un vento
satanico, tra i gemiti degli alberi, con uno schianto netto, una delle
finestre si spalanca mentre i suoi cristalli s'infrangono. E la tempesta
entra liberamente in un tumulto gelido di vento e acqua.
Balziamo in piedi: tutti.
Ed ecco che ad un tratto il riso di Isè la Botta diviene convulso, si
esaspera e si tramuta in urlo disperato. L'uomo è lì, appoggiato ai
bracciuoli, arcuato in avanti, con la bocca spalancata e gli occhi
sbarrati verso la finestra schiantata, come se una visione che noi non
vediamo vi fosse apparsa per lui solo. E certo questa visione
repentina ingrandisce smisuratamente, si erige da ogni lato intorno a
lui e gli riempie il respiro e lo scuote e lo stringe, come se, o venuta
dal mare o dalla terra o dal cielo, cercasse lui solo come mèta da
schiantare a colpi di vento e di pioggia e gli urlasse intorno una
maledizione suprema.
— Nu curtille! (un coltello!). Per la Vergine della Santa Casa, un
coltello! — chiede disperatamente e senza muoversi, mentre per
provvisoria difesa, con la voce roca scaglia all'aria immonde
imprecazioni...
Uno stesso orrore ci toglie ogni moto: uno stesso freddo ci fa
rabbrividire, giovani e vecchi.
E noi vediamo l'uomo levar come pazzo le braccia e mettersi a tagliar
orizzontalmente con le mani, folate di pioggia intorno a sè,
alternando invocazioni alla Vergine e infami bestemmie. Una volta,
due volte egli taglia... Ma improvvisamente altre mani invisibili gli
fermano il gesto folle: e come se un pugno di ferro lo stringesse alla
gola, le sue pupille si arrovesciano, la sua bocca si torce, il suo corpo
si arcua di più, vacilla, ricade all'indietro nella poltrona e resta
immobile, col volto fissato da una maschera violacea e rigida.
Immobile? No: un rapidissimo tremito lo agita ancora...
È

— È ubbriaco, patrò, è ubbriaco! — gridano i vecchi accalcandoglisi
intorno. — Portiamolo via! — Gli farà bene l'acqua... — aggiunge
qualcuno ridendo.
E l'hanno portato via.
L'hanno portato via alla prima sosta della bufera. E tutti lo hanno
accompagnato al suo tugurio attraverso l'ultime raffiche; io l'ho visto
sparire tra due cime di alberi, nella strada allagata, confuso in un
corteo grigio, traballante al vento, bizzarra e macabra carnevalata di
vecchi.
Ma domani tutti lo accompagneranno di nuovo verso la strada
d'Acquaviva dov'è il cimitero, perchè — viene a dirmi dopo poco Antò
Picchinsù piangendo e ridendo come un idiota e facendo croce coi
due indici — Isè la Botta, patrò...
— No, no, tu non ne hai colpa — soggiunge rispondendo al mio
muto sussulto. — Lo Scïò se lo sarebbe preso lo stesso... Questo è
sicuro! Del resto — prosegue guardandomi fiso con improvvisa
fiamma — se, Dio non voglia, ne avessi colpa tu...
— Ebbene?
Lentamente, come assegnasse ad ogni parola un minaccioso
destino:
— Patrò: — dice — ma non vivi anche tu in mare come vi abbiamo
vissuto noi? Non conosci anche tu i cieli neri, le nuvole che
s'allungano e che fan bollire l'acqua?
E dopo una pausa, abbassando la voce come per entrare in contatto
intimo col mio spirito, ponendomi le labbra quasi all'orecchio:
— E le parole del diavolo, le sai, patrò? — sussurra.
No: non le so. So che l'alito di questo vecchio è perfido...
— E allora... lo rivedresti... Sempre. Non ti lascerebbe più... Sai
«patrò»!... E poi non le scrivere queste cose, sai «patrò»!...

1914.
Yet, Italy! . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . thy hand
Was then our guardian, and is still our guide.
(Byêçn).
Sdraiarsi sulla sabbia soffice e calda, lontano dagli uomini,
contemplare il cielo e arrischiarsi nell'infinito, mantenere inerti le
membra e affilar l'udito perchè nulla si perda dall'eterna aspra
melodia che il mare canta... e lasciar che il sole morda appieno nelle
carni quasi nude, basta questo al breve riposo degli stanchi e dei
tormentati. Chiudendo gli occhi senza troppo stringere le palpebre,
entra nell'anima come una luce di prodigio fatta d'oro e di rame
volatizzati e ogni ricordo di visioni della terra intorno, svanisce. Se
fosse possibile restar a lungo così e dar meno presa agli artigli della
vita, io credo che...
Diamine! Troppo presto! Ritorna l'uomo: anzi l'embrione d'uno
speciale tipo d'uomo che ha già in germe quasi tutto il protoplasma
putrido della razza: un ragazzetto dell'Hôtel: l'anonimo «Lift» o
«Chasseur». Nel giugno di quest'anno di grazia 1914 si parla ormai
così dappertutto: e più specialmente così in questo immenso,
effervescente, emporio d'internazionalismo, di «rastas» e di tango
che è l'Hôtel Excelsior del Lido di Venezia.
— Ihre Post ist hier. — È qui la sua posta.
Pure il tedesco! Questo ragazzo è completo.

— Parlami italiano e dammi la posta. Di dove sei?
— Di Torino, Signore.
— E perchè parli tedesco?
— Perchè il primo cameriere vuole così. E poi mio padre è tedesco.
— E tua madre?
— Egiziana, ma figlia di greci.
C'è tutto. Intravedo un complicato e vagabondo romanzo di
guardaroba e cucina, un poco più basso dei romanzi dei piani
superiori degli alberghi. E questo ibrido essere vestito di rosso, dal
viso già sfiorito, dallo sguardo reso già obliquo dall'ereditarietà della
mancia, ne è il prodotto.
— E ora vattene.
Ed eccomi solo col giornaliero mucchio di carta in mano, la porzione
quotidiana di vanità e menzogne trattenuta sul setaccio di varie
calligrafie e di non sempre ferme ortografie.
...«Pregiatissimo... Carissimo... Egregio... Stimatissimo... Illustre...»
Sicuro: tutto il rispetto umano si rifugia nello scritto: alla voce, il
resto...
«Amico mio» — Ahi!... — «suo silenzio»... «tè»... «sempre»...
Riduciamo, per esempio, a dieci giorni questo «sempre»: un rapido
calcolo finanziario, e...
Avanti.
«Si ha il pregio di portare a conoscenza della S. V. che a parziale
scioglimento della riserva contenuta nel foglio citato a margine...» —
Servizio: per la burocrazia il mare parla così.
················
— «Patrò»... Oh! San Benedetto del Tronto! Chi sarà? Ma riconosco
subito i poco ortodossi caratteri dell'unico scrivano pubblico locale, al

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