EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER26 How the Origins of Written Language Instruct Us to Teach: A Response to

inflectional endings (e.g.,-ed can be pro-nounced several ways); and (d) the “histor-ically determined logographic character ” of the alphabet. In the latter point Strauss argues that the alphabetic system is a man-ifestation of a much earlier logographic writing system, where visual symbols rep-resented meanings far more directly (e.g., in some early hieroglyphic logographic sys-tems, a visual drawing of a bird represented the word bird in that oral language). Strauss uses the assertion about logo-graphic roots to argue that if the alphabet is historically based on the direct appre-hension of meaning, then the current em-phasis in much reading research on the letter–sound or grapheme–phoneme rules of correspondence in written language is linguistically unnatural and pedagogically unnecessary in the teaching of reading. Further, such logographic origins, he as-serts, provide a rationale for the use of what are called whole-language reading methods, which eschew the direct learning of grapheme–phoneme rules (decoding) and emphasize meaning from the start. The end of Strauss ’ argument is that written lan-guage, like oral language, should be ac-quired “naturally, ” with the rules of written language induced by each child from the same linguistic environments that support the child’s development of oral language. We first treat the strands of evidence that Strauss invokes in calling the alphabetic principle “flimsy”; we then address claims regarding the origins of the alphabetic sys-tem. First, the fact that the English orthog-raphy has multiple spellings for a particular sound pattern and for multiple homonyms has little to do with the alphabetic principle and much to do with the morphophonemic nature of the English writing system or orthography. Several examples from one of Strauss ’ references—Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle’s (1968) classic work—wil