This article investigates continuities and changes in abbreviation practices from late Middle English to twenty-first-century digital platforms. Adopting a diachronic perspective and lexicological framework, it quantitatively analyses frequency patterns across fifteenth-century memoranda, letters and administrative receipts, seventeenth-century letters and depositions, late nineteenth-century letters, early twentieth-century letters and a subcorpus of WhatsApp instant messages dating from 2018–19. It then presents analyses of the frequencies of various abbreviation forms, such as clippings, and abbreviated lexemes, such as their use for names, over time. The article then provides a qualitative analysis of these lexeme categories over the centuries, with a focus on specific examples. Major changes to overall abbreviation density across time are identified. The forms of abbreviation also go through major change, but the types of lexemes that are abbreviated stay more consistent over time. For example, abbreviations being used for closed-class function words such as the and that are dominant from the earliest data we have looked at to the present day. Overall, the study demonstrates how situating new media abbreviation practices within a historical continuum can enhance our understanding of them.

This article positions braille as a writing system worthy of study in its own right and on its own terms. We begin with a discussion of the role of braille in the lives of those who read and write it and a call for more attention to braille in the reading sciences. We then give an overview of the history and development of braille, focusing on its formal characteristics as a writing system, in order to acquaint sighted print readers with the basics of braille and to spark further interest among reading researchers. We then explore how print-centric assumptions and sight-centric motivations have potentially negative consequences, not only for braille users but also for the types of questions researchers think to pursue. We conclude with recommendations for conducting responsible and informed research about braille. We affirm that blindness is most equitably understood as but one of the many diverse ways humans experience the world. Researching braille literacy from an equity and diversity perspective provides positive, fruitful insights into perception and cognition, contributes to the typologically oriented work on the world’s writing systems, and contributes to equity by centering the perspectives and literacy of the people who read and write braille.

Over the course of the sixteenth century in Mexico (New Spain), alphabetic writing replaced pictography as the chosen form of written expression in indigenous communities. A new social role, that of the native language escribano (notary), emerged, eventually to become a principal cultural broker in the colonial period. Despite the indigenous escribano's importance, his origins and the source of his authority within the native sphere are poorly understood. This article offers a close reading of a corpus of hybrid pictographic-alphabetic documents, written in Nahuatl and created between 1553 and 1572 in the indigenous cabildo (town council) of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Within this important body, escribanos appear early in the documentary record; it was within the established indigenous ecosystem of governance that escribanos first found a niche.

Here, pictography flourished, as did performances unique to the indigenous sphere. The corpus reveals how escribanos worked side by side with indigenous tlahcuilohqueh, or painters, who drew on a long-established tradition of manuscript painting and cartography to create property maps. These maps adhered to established codes, both social and visual. Initially preeminent in itself, the work of the tlahcuilohqueh came to supply meaning and public authority to the work of the escribano in this crucial formative period.

We examined the cross-lagged relations between word reading fluency in the two orthographic systems of Japanese: phonetic (syllabic) Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. One hundred forty-two Japanese-speaking children were assessed on word reading fluency twice in Grade 1 (Times 1 and 2) and twice in Grade 2 (Times 3 and 4). Nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming were also assessed in Time 1. Results of path analysis revealed that Time 1 Hiragana fluency predicted Time 2 Kanji fluency after controlling for the cognitive skills. Time 2 Hiragana fluency did not predict Time 3 Kanji fluency or vice versa after the autoregressor was controlled, but Hiragana and Kanji fluency were reciprocally related between Times 3 and 4. These findings provide evidence for a cross-script transfer of word reading fluency across the two contrastive orthographic systems, and the first evidence of fluency in a morphographic script predicting fluency development in a phonetic script within the same language.

The authors investigate the origins of the earliest script of the Cherokees, using inscriptions in the Red Bird River Shelter. Their analysis suggests that the engravings in the cave show the experimental creation of a syllabary (alphabet of signs). This in turn offers support for the historical notion that this writing system was not an ancestral practice preserved through missionaries, but an invention of the early nineteenth century; one that should be credited to the Native American pioneer scholar, Sequoyah.

This article investigates the role of script choice in bilingual writing, drawing on classified advertisements and other texts written for and by Russian-speaking immigrants in New York City. The study focuses on English-origin items that appear in Russian texts, which are found to be written either in roman or Cyrillic script. Through an investigation of categorical and variable constraints on this variation, it is found that script choice relates to the distinction between lexical borrowing and single-item codeswitching. It is argued that writers may, consciously and on a token-by-token basis, choose the Cyrillic script to mark a word as borrowed or the roman script to mark it as foreign. However, they may also avoid this choice, as hybrid forms attest, especially when the use of characters shared by both alphabets allows ambiguous readings. The findings thus have implications for understanding notions of language boundaries in bilingual language use.Versions of this article were presented at two conferences: “Alphabetics: Interpreting letters” at Harvard University, 26–27 April 2003, and NWAVE 32, Philadelphia, 9–12 October 2003. I thank the audiences for their valuable insights and observations, especially Erika Boeckeler and Daniel Kokin. I also owe thanks to Katya Korsunskaya, Vladislav Rapoport, Doris Stolberg, Mario Geiger, and Tobias Kuhn. I am grateful to John Victor Singler, Mark Sebba, and Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, as well as to Jane H. Hill and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors and omissions remain my own.