A phonemic orthography is an
orthography (system for writing a
language) in which the
grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.
The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...
s (written symbols) correspond to the
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
s (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letter (alphabet), letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character ...
ic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is.
English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but
spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. However, because of their relatively recent modernizations compared to English, the
Serbian
Serbian may refer to:
* someone or something related to Serbia, a country in Southeastern Europe
* someone or something related to the Serbs, a South Slavic people
* Serbian language
* Serbian names
See also
*
*
* Old Serbian (disambiguation ...
/
Croatian/
Bosnian/
Montenegrin,
Romanian
Romanian may refer to:
*anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania
** Romanians, an ethnic group
**Romanian language, a Romance language
***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language
**Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
,
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional It ...
,
Turkish,
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
,
Finnish,
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
* Czech ...
,
Latvian,
Esperanto
Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international commun ...
,
Korean and
Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
In less formal terms, a language with a highly phonemic orthography may be described as having regular spelling. Another terminology is that of
deep and shallow orthographies, in which the depth of an orthography is the degree to which it diverges from being truly phonemic. The concept can also be applied to nonalphabetic writing systems like
syllabaries
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.
A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
.
Ideal phonemic orthography
In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence (
bijection
In mathematics, a bijection, also known as a bijective function, one-to-one correspondence, or invertible function, is a function between the elements of two sets, where each element of one set is paired with exactly one element of the other ...
) between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language, and each phoneme would invariably be represented by its corresponding grapheme. So the spelling of a word would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation, and conversely, a speaker knowing the pronunciation of a word would be able to infer its spelling without any doubt. That ideal situation is rare but exists in a few languages.
A disputed example of an ideally phonemic orthography is the
Serbo-Croatian language. In its alphabet (
Latin as well as
Serbian Cyrillic alphabet
The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet ( sr, / , ) is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language, updated in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write standard modern Serbian, th ...
), there are 30 graphemes, each uniquely corresponding to one of the phonemes. This seemingly perfect yet simple phonemic orthography was achieved in the 19th century—the Cyrillic alphabet first in 1814 by Serbian linguist
Vuk Karadžić, and the Latin alphabet in 1830 by Croatian linguist
Ljudevit Gaj. However, both Gaj's Latin alphabet and Serbian Cyrillic do not distinguish short and long vowels, and non-tonic (the short one is written), rising, and falling tones that Serbo-Croatian has. In Serbo-Croatian, the tones and vowel lengths were optionally written as (in Latin) ⟨e⟩, ⟨ē⟩, ⟨è⟩, ⟨é⟩, ⟨ȅ⟩, and ⟨ȇ⟩, especially in dictionaries.
Another such ideal phonemic orthography is native to
Esperanto
Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international commun ...
, employing the language creator L. L. Zamenhof's then-pronounced principle “one letter, one sound”.
There are two distinct types of deviation from this phonemic ideal. In the first case, the exact one-to-one correspondence may be lost (for example, some phoneme may be represented by a
digraph instead of a single letter), but the "regularity" is retained: there is still an
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
(but a more complex one) for predicting the spelling from the pronunciation and vice versa. In the second case, true irregularity is introduced, as certain words come to be spelled and pronounced according to different rules from others, and prediction of spelling from pronunciation and vice versa is no longer possible. Common cases of both types of deviation from the ideal are discussed in the following section.
Deviations from phonemic orthography
Some ways in which orthographies may deviate from the ideal of one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence are listed below. The first list contains deviations that tend only to make the relation between spelling and pronunciation more complex, without affecting its predictability (see above paragraph).
Case 1: Regular
''Pronunciation and spelling still correspond in a predictable way''
*A phoneme may be represented by a sequence of letters, called a
multigraph
In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a multigraph is a graph which is permitted to have multiple edges (also called ''parallel edges''), that is, edges that have the same end nodes. Thus two vertices may be connected by mor ...
, rather than by a single letter (as in the case of the
digraph ''ch'' in French and the
trigraph ''sch'' in German). That only retains predictability if the multigraph cannot be broken down into smaller units. Some languages use diacritics to distinguish between a digraph and a sequence of individual letters, and others require knowledge of the language to distinguish them; compare ''
goatherd
A goatherd or goatherder is a person who herds goats as a vocational activity. It is similar to a shepherd who herds sheep. Goatherds are most commonly found in regions where goat populations are significant; for instance, in Africa and South Asi ...
'' and ''
loather'' in English.
Examples:
''sch'' versus ''s-ch'' in
Romansch
''ng'' versus ''n'' + ''g'' in
Welsh
''ch'' versus ''çh'' in
Manx Gaelic
Manx ( or , pronounced or ), also known as Manx Gaelic, is a Gaelic language of the insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family. Manx is the historical language of the Manx people ...
: this is a slightly different case where the same digraph is used for two different single phonemes.
''ai'' versus ''aï'' in
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
This is often due to the use of an alphabet that was originally used for a different language (the
Latin alphabet in these examples) and so does not have single letters available for all the phonemes used in the current language (although some orthographies use devices such as
diacritics to increase the number of available letters).
*Sometimes, conversely, a single letter may represent a sequence of more than one phoneme (as ''
x'' can represent the sequence /ks/ in English and other languages).
*Sometimes, the rules of correspondence are more complex and depend on adjacent letters, often as a result of historical
sound changes (as with the rules for the pronunciation of ''ca'' and ''ci'' in
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional It ...
and the
silent ''e'' in English).
Case 2: Irregular
''Pronunciation and spelling do not always correspond in a predictable way''
* Sometimes, different letters correspond to the same phoneme (for instance ''u'' and ''ó'' in
Polish are both pronounced as the phoneme /u/). That is often for historical reasons (the Polish letters originally stood for different phonemes, which later
merged
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...
phonologically). That affects the predictability of spelling from pronunciation but not necessarily vice versa. Another example is found in
Modern Greek, whose phoneme /i/ can be written in six different ways: ι, η, υ, ει, οι and υι.
* Conversely, a letter or group of letters can correspond to different phonemes in different contexts. For example, ''
th'' in English can be pronounced as /ð/ (as in ''this'') or /θ/ (as in ''thin''), as well as /th/ (as in ''goatherd'').
*Spelling may otherwise represent a historical pronunciation; orthography does not necessarily keep up with
sound changes in the spoken language. For example, both the ''k'' and the
digraph ''gh'' of English ''knight'' were once pronounced (the latter is still pronounced in some
Scots varieties), but after the
loss
Loss may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* ''Loss'' (Bass Communion album) (2006)
* ''Loss'' (Mull Historical Society album) (2001)
*"Loss", a song by God Is an Astronaut from their self-titled album (2008)
* Losses "(Lil Tjay son ...
of their sounds, they no longer represent the word's phonemic structure or its pronunciation.
*Spelling may represent the pronunciation of a different
dialect from the one being considered.
*Spellings of
loanwords often adhere to or are influenced by the orthography of the source language (as with the English words ''ballet'' and ''fajita'', from French and
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
respectively). With some loanwords, though, regularity is retained either by
** nativizing the pronunciation to match the spelling (as with the
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
* Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and p ...
word шофёр, from French ''chauffeur'' but pronounced in accordance with the normal rules of
Russian vowel reduction; see also
spelling pronunciation) or by
**
nativizing the spelling (for example, ''football'' is spelt ''fútbol'' in Spanish and ''futebol'' in
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
).
*Spelling may reflect a
folk etymology (as in the English words ''hiccough'' and ''island'', so spelt because of an imagined connection with the words ''cough'' and ''isle''), or distant etymology (as in the English word ''debt'' in which the silent ''b'' was added under the influence of Latin).
* Spelling may reflect
morphophonemic
Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes ...
structure rather than the purely phonemic (see next section) although it is often also a reflection of historical pronunciation.
Most orthographies do not reflect the changes in pronunciation known as
sandhi
Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...
in which pronunciation is affected by adjacent sounds in neighboring words (written
Sanskrit and other
Indian languages, however, reflect such changes). A language may also use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items such as the Japanese
hiragana and
katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fro ...
syllabaries (and the different treatment in English orthography of words derived from Latin and Greek).
Morphophonemic features
Alphabetic orthographies often have features that are
morphophonemic
Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes ...
rather than purely phonemic. This means that the spelling reflects to some extent the underlying
morphological structure of the words, not only their pronunciation. Hence different forms of a
morpheme (minimum meaningful unit of language) are often spelt identically or similarly in spite of differences in their pronunciation. That is often for historical reasons; the morphophonemic spelling reflects a previous pronunciation from before historical
sound changes that caused the variation in pronunciation of a given morpheme. Such spellings can assist in the recognition of words when reading.
Some examples of morphophonemic features in orthography are described below.
*The English plural morpheme is written ''-s'' regardless of whether it is pronounced as or , e.g. ''cats and dogs'', not ''cats and dogz''. This is because the and sounds are forms of the same underlying
morphophoneme
Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (mi ...
, automatically pronounced differently depending on its environment. (However, when this morpheme takes the form , the addition of the vowel ''is'' reflected in the spelling: ''churches'', ''masses''.)
*Similarly the English past tense morpheme is written ''-ed'' regardless of whether it is pronounced as , or .
*Many English words retain spellings that reflect their
etymology and morphology rather than their present-day pronunciation. For example, ''sign'' and ''signature'' include the spelling , which means the same but is pronounced differently in the two words. Other examples are ''science'' vs. ''conscience'' , ''prejudice'' vs. ''prequel'' , ''nation'' vs. ''nationalism'' , and ''special'' vs. ''species'' .
*Phonological
assimilation
Assimilation may refer to:
Culture
* Cultural assimilation, the process whereby a minority group gradually adapts to the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture and customs
** Language shift, also known as language assimilation, the prog ...
is often not reflected in spelling even in otherwise phonemic orthographies such as Spanish, in which ''obtener'' "obtain" and ''optimista'' "optimist" are written with ''b'' and ''p'', but are commonly
neutralized with regard to voicing and pronounced in various ways, such as both
�in neutral style or both
in emphatic pronunciation. On the other hand, Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin) spelling reflects assimilation so one writes ''Србија/Srbija'' "Serbia" but ''српски/srpski'' "Serbian".
*The
final-obstruent devoicing that occurs in many languages (such as German, Polish and Russian) is not normally reflected in the spelling. For example, in German, ''Bad'' "bath" is spelt with a final even though it is pronounced , thus corresponding to other morphologically related forms such as the verb ''baden'' (bathe) in which the ''d'' is pronounced . (Compare ', ' ("advice", "advise") in which the ''t'' is pronounced in both positions.)
Turkish orthography, however, is more strictly phonemic: for example, the imperative of ''eder'' "does" is spelled ''et'', as it is pronounced (and the same as the word for "meat"), not ''*ed'', as it would be if German spelling were used.
Korean ''
hangul'' has changed over the centuries from a highly phonemic to a largely morphophonemic orthography. Japanese kana are almost completely phonemic but have a few morphophonemic aspects, notably in the use of ぢ ''di'' and づ ''du'' (rather than じ ''ji'' and ず ''zu'', their pronunciation in standard
Tokyo dialect
The Tokyo dialect () is a variety of Japanese language spoken in modern Tokyo. As a whole, it is generally considered to be Standard Japanese, though specific aspects of slang or pronunciation can vary by area and social class.
Overview
T ...
), when the character is a voicing of an underlying ち or つ. That is from the
rendaku sound change combined with the
yotsugana
are a set of four specific kana, じ, ぢ, ず, づ (in the Nihon-shiki romanization system: ''zi'', ''di'', ''zu'', ''du''), used in the Japanese writing system. They historically represented four distinct voiced morae (syllables) in ...
merger of formally different morae. The
Russian orthography
Russian orthography (russian: правописа́ние, r=pravopisaniye, p=prəvəpʲɪˈsanʲɪjə) is formally considered to encompass spelling ( rus, орфогра́фия, r=orfografiya, p=ɐrfɐˈɡrafʲɪjə) and punctuation ( rus, п ...
is also mostly morphophonemic, because it does not reflect vowel reduction, consonant assimilation and final-obstruent devoicing. Also, some consonant combinations have silent consonants.
Defective orthographies
A
defective orthography A defective script is a writing system that does not represent all the phonemic distinctions of a language. This means that the concept is always relative to a given language. Taking the Latin alphabet used in Italian orthography as an example, the ...
is one that is not capable of representing all the phonemes or phonemic distinctions in a language. An example of such a deficiency in English orthography is the lack of distinction between the voiced and voiceless "th" phonemes ( and , respectively), occurring in words like ''this'' (voiced) and ''thin'' (voiceless) respectively, with both written .
Comparison between languages
Languages whose current orthographies have a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include:
*
Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans grad ...
*
Kurdish
*
Maltese
*
Estonian
Estonian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe
* Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent
* Estonian language
* Estonian cuisine
* Estonian culture
See also
*
...
(apart from palatalization or long and "over-long" phoneme length distinction)
*
Finnish
*
Albanian
*
Georgian
*
Hindi (apart from schwa deletion)
*
Sanskrit
*
Kannada
*
Telugu
Telugu may refer to:
* Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India
*Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India
* Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language
** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode
...
*
Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam was des ...
*
Dhivehi
Dhivehi, also spelled Divehi, may refer to:
*Dhivehi people, an ethnic group native to the historic region of the Maldive Islands.
*Dhivehi language, an Indo-Aryan language predominantly spoken by about 350,000 people in the Republic of Maldives
...
*
Turkish (apart from ''ğ'' and various palatal and vowel allophones)
*
Serbo-Croatian (
Serbian
Serbian may refer to:
* someone or something related to Serbia, a country in Southeastern Europe
* someone or something related to the Serbs, a South Slavic people
* Serbian language
* Serbian names
See also
*
*
* Old Serbian (disambiguation ...
,
Croatian,
Bosnian and
Montenegrin; written in either
Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = Gr ...
or
Latin script)
*
Slovenian
Slovene or Slovenian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Slovenia, a country in Central Europe
* Slovene language, a South Slavic language mainly spoken in Slovenia
* Slovenes, an ethno-linguistic group mainly living in Slovenia
* Sl ...
*
Bulgarian
*
Macedonian
Macedonian most often refers to someone or something from or related to Macedonia.
Macedonian(s) may specifically refer to:
People Modern
* Macedonians (ethnic group), a nation and a South Slavic ethnic group primarily associated with North Ma ...
(if the apostrophe denoting
schwa is counted, though slight inconsistencies may be found)
*
Eastern Armenian (apart from ''o'', ''v'')
*
Basque
Basque may refer to:
* Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France
* Basque language, their language
Places
* Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France
* Basque Country (autonomous co ...
(apart from palatalized ''l'', ''n'')
*
Haitian Creole
*
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
(apart from ''h'', ''x'', ''b''/''v'', and sometimes ''k'', ''c'', ''g'', ''j'', ''z'')
*
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
* Czech ...
(apart from ''ě'', ''ů'', ''y'', ''ý'')
*
Polish (apart from ''ó'', ''ch'', ''rz'' and nasal vowels ''ą'' and ''ę'')
*
Romanian
Romanian may refer to:
*anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania
** Romanians, an ethnic group
**Romanian language, a Romance language
***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language
**Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
(apart from ''â'' or ''î'' (see
Î versus Â))
*
Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
(mainly phonemic with some other historical/morphological rules, as well as palatalization)
*
Belarusian
Belarusian may refer to:
* Something of, or related to Belarus
* Belarusians, people from Belarus, or of Belarusian descent
* A citizen of Belarus, see Demographics of Belarus
* Belarusian language
* Belarusian culture
* Belarusian cuisine
* Byelor ...
(phonemic for vowels but mostly morphophonemic for consonants except ''ў'' written phonetically)
*
Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties and anyway are sparsely used)
*
Mongolian (Cyrillic) (apart from letters representing multiple sounds depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate from and voiced versus voiceless consonants)
*
Azerbaijani
Azerbaijani may refer to:
* Something of, or related to Azerbaijan
* Azerbaijanis
* Azerbaijani language
See also
* Azerbaijan (disambiguation)
* Azeri (disambiguation)
* Azerbaijani cuisine
* Culture of Azerbaijan
The culture of Azerbaijan ...
(apart from ''k'')
*
Hungarian (apart from ''j'' and ''ly'')
*
Oromo
Many otherwise phonemic orthographies are slightly
defective:
Malay (incl.
Malaysian and
Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
),
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional It ...
,
Maltese,
Welsh, and
Kazakh do not fully distinguish their vowels;
Lithuanian
Lithuanian may refer to:
* Lithuanians
* Lithuanian language
* The country of Lithuania
* Grand Duchy of Lithuania
* Culture of Lithuania
* Lithuanian cuisine
* Lithuanian Jews as often called "Lithuanians" (''Lita'im'' or ''Litvaks'') by other Jew ...
,
Latvian, and
Serbo-Croatian do not distinguish
tone and vowel length (also additional vowels for Lithuanian and Latvian);
Somali does not distinguish vowel
phonation; and the graphemes ''b'' and ''v'' represent the same phoneme in all varieties of Spanish (except in Valencia), while in the Spanish of the Americas, can be represented by graphemes ''s'', ''c'', or ''z''. Modern Indo-Aryan languages like
Hindi,
Punjabi
Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan
* Punjabi language
* Punjabi people
* Punjabi dialects and languages
Punjabi may also refer to:
* Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
,
Gujarati
Gujarati may refer to:
* something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India
* Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat
* Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them
* Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub- ...
,
Maithili and several others feature
schwa deletion, where the implicit default vowel is suppressed without being explicitly marked as such. Others, like
Marathi, do not have a high grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence for vowel lengths.
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
, with its
silent letters and its heavy use of
nasal vowels and
elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. The phoneme-to-letter correspondence, on the other hand, is often low and a sequence of sounds may have multiple ways of being spelt, often with different meanings.
Orthographies such as those of
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
,
Hungarian (mainly phonemic with the exception ''ly'', ''j'' representing the same sound, but consonant and vowel length are not always accurate and various spellings reflect etymology, not pronunciation),
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
, and modern
Greek (written with the
Greek alphabet), as well as Korean
hangul, are sometimes considered to be of intermediate depth (for example they include many morphophonemic features, as described above).
Similarly to French, it is much easier to infer the pronunciation of a German word from its spelling than vice versa. For example, for speakers who merge /eː/ and /ɛː/, the phoneme /eː/ may be spelt ''e'', ''ee'', ''eh'', ''ä'' or ''äh''.
English orthography is highly non-phonemic. The irregularity of English spelling arises partly because the
Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established; partly because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels; and partly because the regularisation of the spelling (moving away from the situation in which many different spellings were acceptable for the same word) happened arbitrarily over a period without any central plan. However even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and several of these rules are successful most of the time; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.
Most
constructed language
A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. ...
s such as
Esperanto
Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international commun ...
and
Lojban have mostly phonemic orthographies.
The
syllabary systems of
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
(
hiragana and
katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fro ...
) are examples of almost perfectly shallow orthography – exceptions include the use of ぢ and づ (
discussed above) and the use of は, を, and へ to represent the sounds わ, お, and え, as relics of
historical kana usage
The , or , refers to the in general use until orthographic reforms after World War II; the current orthography was adopted by Cabinet order in 1946. By that point the historical orthography was no longer in accord with Japanese pronunciatio ...
. There is also no indication of pitch accent, which results in homography of words like 箸 and 橋 (はし in hiragana), which are distinguished in speech.
Xavier Marjou uses an
artificial neural network
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
An ANN is based on a collection of connected units ...
to rank 17 orthographies according to their level of
Orthographic depth. Among the tested orthographies, Chinese and French orthographies, followed by English and Russian, are the most opaque regarding writing (i.e. phonemes to graphemes direction) and English, followed by Dutch, is the most opaque regarding reading (i.e. graphemes to phonemes direction); Esperanto, Arabic, Finnish, Korean, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish are very shallow both to read and to write; Italian is shallow to read and very shallow to write, Breton, German, Portuguese and Spanish are shallow to read and to write.
Realignment of orthography
With time,
pronunciations change and spellings become out of date, as has happened to English and
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
. In order to maintain a phonemic orthography such a system would need periodic updating, as has been attempted by various
language regulators and proposed by other
spelling reformers.
Sometimes the pronunciation of a word changes to match its spelling; this is called a
spelling pronunciation. This is most common with loanwords, but occasionally occurs in the case of established native words too.
In some English personal names and place names, the relationship between the spelling of the name and its pronunciation is so distant that associations between phonemes and graphemes cannot be readily identified. Moreover, in many other words, the pronunciation has subsequently evolved from a fixed spelling, so that it has to be said that the phonemes represent the graphemes rather than vice versa. And in much technical jargon, the primary medium of communication is the written language rather than the spoken language, so the phonemes represent the graphemes, and it is unimportant how the word is pronounced. Moreover, the sounds which literate people perceive being heard in a word are significantly influenced by the actual spelling of the word.
Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a
spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when
Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a
Turkish alphabet of Latin origin.
Phonetic transcription
Methods for phonetic transcription such as the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) aim to describe pronunciation in a standard form. They are often used to solve ambiguities in the spelling of written language. They may also be used to write languages with no previous written form. Systems like IPA can be used for phonemic representation or for showing more detailed phonetic information (see
Narrow vs. broad transcription).
Phonemic orthographies are different from phonetic transcription; whereas in a phonemic orthography,
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
s will usually be represented by the same grapheme, a purely phonetic script would demand that phonetically distinct allophones be distinguished. To take an example from American English: the sound in the words "table" and "cat" would, in a phonemic orthography, be written with the same character; however, a strictly phonetic script would make a distinction between the
aspirated "t" in "table", the
flap in "butter", the
unaspirated
In linguistics, a tenuis consonant ( or ) is an obstruent that is voiceless, unaspirated and unglottalized.
In other words, it has the "plain" phonation of with a voice onset time close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as Spanish ''p, t, ch, ...
"t" in "stop" and the
glottalized
Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consonan ...
"t" in "cat" (not all these allophones exist in all English
dialects). In other words, the sound that most English speakers think of as is really a group of sounds, all pronounced slightly differently depending on where they occur in a word. A perfect phonemic orthography has one letter per group of sounds (phoneme), with different letters only where the sounds distinguish words (so "bed" is spelled differently from "bet").
A narrow phonetic transcription represents
phones
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
, the sounds humans are capable of producing, many of which will often be grouped together as a single phoneme in any given natural language, though the groupings vary across languages. English, for example, does not distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but other languages, like
Korean,
Bengali
Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to:
*something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia
* Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region
* Bengali language, the language they speak
** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
and
Hindi do.
The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the
International Phonetic Alphabet.
See also
*
Alphabetic principle
According to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words. T ...
*
English-language spelling reform
*
Spelling
Spelling is a set of conventions that regulate the way of using graphemes (writing system) to represent a language in its written form. In other words, spelling is the rendering of speech sound (phoneme) into writing (grapheme). Spelling is one ...
*
Morphophonology
Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes ...
*
Orthographic depth
*
Orthographic transcription
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Phonemic Orthography
Orthography
Phonetics
Phonology
Spelling