Orthography

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For the type of projection, see Orthographic projection.
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An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word boundaries, emphasis, and punctuation.

Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system,[a] and most of these systems have undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language.[1][2] 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), no such authority exists, and a sense of "correct" orthography develops through encounters with print in schooling, workplace, and informal contexts. Some organizations, such as newspapers of record and academic journals, choose greater orthographic homogeneity by enforcing a particular style guide or spelling standard such as Oxford spelling
.

Etymology and meaning

The

Ancient Greek: ὀρθός (orthós, 'correct') and γράφειν (gráphein, 'to write').[3]

Orthography is largely concerned with matters of spelling, and in particular the relationship between phonemes and graphemes in a language.[4][5] Other elements that may be considered part of orthography include hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks/boundaries, emphasis, and punctuation.[6] Orthography thus describes or defines the set of symbols used in writing a language and the conventions that broadly regulate their use.

Most

prescriptively correct, way of writing a language. A distinction may be made here between etic and emic
viewpoints: the purely descriptive (etic) approach, which simply considers any system that is actually used—and the emic view, which takes account of language users' perceptions of correctness.

Units and notation

This page uses orthographic and related notations. For the notations ⟨ ⟩, / / and [ ]  used in this article, see IPA Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Orthographic units, such as letters of an

lowercase Latin letter 'a': a and ɑ. Since, however, the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, which can be written ⟨a⟩. The italic and bold face
forms are also allographic.

Graphemes or sequences of them are sometimes placed between angle brackets, as in ⟨b⟩ or ⟨back⟩. This distinguishes them from phonemic transcription, which is placed between slashes (/b/, /bæk/), and from phonetic transcription, which is placed between square brackets ([b], [bæk]).

Types

The

romaji characters may also be used as needed.[7]

Correspondence with pronunciation

Orthographies that use

Serbo-Croatian orthographies more consistently approximate the principle "one letter per sound."[citation needed
]

An orthography in which the correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are highly complex or inconsistent is called a

deep orthography
(or less formally, the language is said to have irregular spelling). An orthography with relatively simple and consistent correspondences is called shallow (and the language has regular spelling).

One of the main reasons why spelling and pronunciation diverge is that

morphophonemic structure rather than its purely phonemic structure (for example, the English regular past tense morpheme is consistently spelled -ed in spite of its different pronunciations in various words). This is discussed further at Phonemic orthography § Morphophonemic features
.

The

historical kana usage
.

Korean hangul and Tibetan scripts were also originally extremely shallow orthographies, but as a representation of the modern language those frequently also reflect morphophonemic features.

For full discussion of degrees of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in alphabetic orthographies, including reasons why such correspondence may break down, see Phonemic orthography.

Defective orthographies

An orthography based on the principle that symbols correspond to phonemes may, in some cases, lack characters to represent all the phonemes or all the phonemic distinctions in the language. This is called a

defective orthography. An example in English is the lack of any indication of stress. Another is the digraph ⟨th⟩, which represents two different phonemes (as in then and thin) and replaced the old letters ⟨ð⟩ and ⟨þ⟩. A more systematic example is that of abjads like the Arabic and Hebrew
alphabets, in which the short vowels are normally left unwritten and must be inferred by the reader.

When an alphabet is borrowed from its original language for use with a new language—as has been done with the

rune ⟨þ
⟩ in Icelandic.

After the classical period, Greek developed a lowercase letter system that introduced diacritic marks to enable foreigners to learn pronunciation and in some cases, grammatical features. However, as pronunciation of letters changed over time, the diacritic marks were reduced to representing the stressed syllable. In Modern Greek typesetting, this system has been simplified to only have a single accent to indicate which syllable is stressed.[8]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Many local languages have a writing system too, but the majority do not.

References

  1. ISBN 978-3-11-014189-4
  2. ^ Coulmas, Florian; Guerini, Federica (2012), "Literacy and Writing Reform", in Spolsky, Bernard (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy, Cambridge University Press, p. 454f
  3. ^ "orthography". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  4. ^ Seidenberg, Mark S. 1992. "Beyond Orthographic Depth in Reading: Equitable Division of Labor." In: Ram Frost & Leonard Katz (eds.). Ortho545fgraphy, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning, pp. 85–118. Amsterdam: Elsevier, p. 93.
  5. ^ Donohue, Mark. 2007. "Lexicography for Your Friends." In Terry Crowley, Jeff Siegel, & Diana Eades (eds.). Language Description, History and Development: Linguistic Indulgence in Memory of Terry Crowley. pp. 395–406. Amsterdam: Benjamins, p. 396.
  6. ^ Coulmas, Florian. 1996. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 379.
  7. ^ Koda, Keiko; Zehler, Annette M. (Mar 3, 2008). Learning to Read Across Languages. Routledge. p. 17.
  8. S2CID 146449153
    .

Further reading

External links

Look up orthography in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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