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Nahuatl Orthography
Historically Nahuatl has been written with greatly differing orthographies because no institution has governed its spelling. This is still true for the Classical Nahuatl dialect which is a dead language documented in many historical sources and literature, but spelling of the modern dialects of Nahuatl is governed by the Mexican Secretaría de Educación Publica (federal education ministry), although they do have some difficulties in implementing their orthographic standards in the Nahuatl communities. This article describes and compares some of the different transcription systems of the Nahuatl phonological system that have been used. Classical Nahuatl's phonology Vowels Consonants Orthographical history At the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec writing used mostly pictographs supplemented by a few ideograms. When needed, it also used syllabic equivalences; Father Diego Durán recorded how the ''tlàcuilòquê'' (codex painters) could render a prayer in Latin using thi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and most of these systems have undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g., "would" and "should"); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g., "honor" and "honour"). Some nations (e.g. France and Spain) have established language academies in an attempt to regulate orthography officially. For most languages (including English) however, there are no such authorities and a sense of 'correct' orthography evol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |