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Phonemic orthography

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A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which


the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the
language. Languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme-
phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems,
but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is
alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the
modern spellings originated, but spoken English has since changed while the orthography has
remained constant, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. However, because of their
relatively recent modernizations when compared to English,
the Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, and Polish 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.

Contents
[hide]

1Ideal phonemic orthography

2Deviations from phonemic orthography

o 2.1Case 1: Regular

o 2.2Case 2: Irregular

3Morphophonemic features

4Defective orthographies

5Comparison between languages

6Realignment of orthography

7Phonetic transcription

8See also
9References

Ideal phonemic orthography[edit]


In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence (bijection)
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 Serbo-Croatian language. In its alphabet
(Latin as well as Serbian Cyrillic alphabet), 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, when Serbian linguist Vuk Karadi reformed the Cyrillic alphabet and presented it to
the public with a phrase "Write as you speak, read as it is written" (Pii kao to govori, itaj kako
je napisano / , ). This makes reading and writing of
Serbian very easy to learn.[1]
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 (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 of types of deviation from the ideal are discussed in the
following section.

Deviations from phonemic orthography[edit]


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[edit]
Pronunciation and spelling still correspond in a predictable way

A phoneme may be represented by a sequence of letters, called


a multigraph, rather than by a single letter (as in the case of
the digraph ch in English and 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 in English.
Examples:
sch versus s-ch in Romansch
ng versus n + g in Welsh
ch versus h in Manx Gaelic: this is a slightly different case where the same digraph is used for two
different single phonemes.
ai versus a in French
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 and the silent e in English).
Case 2: Irregular[edit]
Pronunciation and spelling do not always correspond in a predictable way

Sometimes, different letters correspond to the same phoneme (for


instance u and 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 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: , , , ,
and .

Conversely, a letter or group of letters can correspond to different


phonemes in different contexts. For example, th in English can be
pronounced as (as in this) or (as in thin); it originally stood for a
single phoneme, which then split.

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, but after the loss 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. Orthographies tend to reflect a standard
variety of the language; however, for an international language with
wide variations in its dialects, such as English, it would be
impossible to represent even the major varieties of the language
with a single phonemic orthography.

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 respectively). With
some loanwords, though, regularity is retained either by
nativizing the pronunciation to match the spelling (as with
the Russian word , from French chauffeur but
pronounced [for] in accordance with the normal rules
of Russian vowel reduction; see also spelling pronunciation) or
by

nativizing the spelling (for example, football is spelt ftbol in


Spanish and futebol in Portuguese).

Spelling may reflect a false etymology (as in the English


words hiccough, 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 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 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 syllabaries (and the different treatment in English orthography of
words derived from Latin and Greek).

Morphophonemic features[edit]
Alphabetic orthographies often have features that are morphophonemic 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 /s/ or /z/; it is cats and dogs, not dogz. This is
because the [s] and [z] sounds are forms of the same
underlying morphophoneme, automatically pronounced differently
depending on its environment. (However when this morpheme
takes the form /z/, 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 /d/, /t/ or /d/.

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 <sign>, which
means the same but is pronounced differently in the two words.
Other examples are
"science /sa/ vs. unconscious //, prejudice /pr/ vs. prequel /pri/,
nation /ne/ vs. nationalism /n/,
and special /sp/ vs. species /spi/.

Phonological assimilation 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 respectively even though both are pronounced /p/ by
assimilation with the following /t/. On the other hand, Serbo-
Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) spelling reflects
assimilation so one writes /Srbija "Serbia"
but /srpski "Serbian".

The final-obstruent devoicing that occurs in many languages (such


as German, Polish, Russian and Welsh) is not normally reflected in
the spelling. For example, in German, Bad "bath" is spelt with a
final d even though it is pronounced /t/, thus corresponding to other
morphologically related forms such as the verb baden (bathe) in
which the d is pronounced /d/. (Compare Rat, raten ("advice",
"advise") in which the t is pronounced /t/ 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.[citation needed] Japanese kana are almost completely phonemic but have a few
morphophonemic aspects, notably in the use of di and du (rather than ji and zu, their
pronunciation in standard Tokyo dialect), when the character is a voicing of an underlying or .
That is from the rendaku sound change combined with the yotsugana merger of formally different
morae. The Russian orthography 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[edit]
A defective orthography 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, occurring in words
like then and thin respectively (both have to be written th). More systematic deficiency is found in
orthographies based on abjadic writing systems like the Arabic and Hebrew scripts, which do not
normally represent the short vowels (although methods are available for doing so in special
situations).

Comparison between languages[edit]


Languages with a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence
(excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation)
include Maltese, Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Turkish (apart from and various palatal and vowel
allophones), Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian), Bulgarian, Macedonian (if the
apostrophe is counted, though slight inconsistencies may be found), Eastern Armenian (apart
from o, v), Basque (apart from palatalized l, n), Haitian Creole, Castilian Spanish (apart
from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z), Czech (apart from , , y, ), Polish (apart
from , h, rz), Romanian (apart from distinguishing semivowels from vowels), Ukrainian (mainly
phonemic with some other historical/morphological rules, as well as
palatalization), Belarusian (phonemic for vowels but morphophonemic for consonants
except written phonetically), Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all
varieties and anyway are sparsely used), Mongolian (apart from letters representing multiple sounds
depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate // from /n/ and
voiced versus voiceless consonants) Azerbaijani (apart from k), and Kazakh (apart
from , , , , ).
Languages with highly phonemic orthographies often lack or rarely use a word corresponding to the
English verb "to spell" because the act of spelling out words is rarely needed (careful pronunciation
of a word is generally sufficient to convey its spelling). That is the case in Italian: spelling is queried
by asking "Come si scrive?" 'How do you write?', and the question is answered by pronouncing the
word syllabically (e.g. [tok.ko.la.to] could be spelled only cioccolato 'chocolate'). It should be noted,
however, that Italian is far from perfectly phonemic, with many phonemes which are impossible to
determine from orthography (for instance 'sci' represents IPA [] in most words, but IPA [ i] in others.
Also the exact pronunciation of e, o, s, z often cannot be determined from orthography).
Many otherwise phonemic orthographies are slightly defective: Malay, Italian, Lithuanian,
and Welsh do not fully distinguish their vowels, Serbian and Croatian do not distinguish tone and
vowel length, Somali does not distinguish vowel phonation, and graphemes b and v represent the
same phoneme in all varieties of Spanish, while in Spanish of the Americas, /s/ can be represented
by graphemes s, c, or z. Modern Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, 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, 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 actual letter-to-phoneme
correspondence, however, is often low and a sequence of sounds may have multiple ways of being
spelt.
Orthographies such as those of German, Hungarian (mainly phonemic with ly, j representing the
same sound, but consonant and vowel length are not always accurate and various spellings reflect
etymology, not pronunciation), Portuguese, 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).
English orthography is highly non-phonemic. As with many languages spoken over a wide area, it
would in any case be hard to construct an orthography that reflected all of the main dialects of
English, because of differences in phonological systems (such as between
standard British and American English, and between these and Australian English with its badlad
split, or even between adjacent counties of Britain). 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 languages such as Esperanto and Lojban have mostly phonemic orthographies.
The syllabary systems of Japanese (hiragana and katakana) are examples of almost perfectly
shallow orthography exceptions include the use of and (discussed above) and the use of ,
, and to represent the sounds , , and , as relics of historical kana usage.

Realignment of orthography[edit]
With time, pronunciations change and spellings become out of date, as has happened to English
and French. 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. [2]
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[edit]
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, allophones 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 /t/ 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 "t" in "stop" and the glottalized "t" in
"cat" (not all these allophones exist in all English dialects). In other words, the sound that most
English speakers think of as /t/ 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, the atomic 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 and Hindi, do. On the other hand, Korean does not distinguish between voiced
and voiceless consonants unlike a number of other languages.
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[edit]
Alphabetic principle

English spelling reform

Spelling

Morphophonology

Orthographic depth

Orthographic transcription

References[edit]
1. Jump up^ The Graphical Basis of Phones and Phonemes, Robert F.
Port, Indiana University. 2005

2. Jump up^ David Stark. "Standardised Spelling - Pronunciation 1.".


The English Spelling Society. Archived from the original on 7 March
2014.
Categories:
Orthography
Phonetics
Phonology
Spelling

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