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Orthography Reform
A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples are the German orthography reform of 1996 and the on-off Portuguese spelling reform of 1990, which is still being ratified. There are various goals which may drive such reforms: facilitating literacy and international communication, making etymology clearer, or for aesthetic or political reasons. Opposition is often based upon concern that old literature will become inaccessible, the presumed suppression of regional accents, the need to learn the new spellings, making etymology less clear, or simple conservatism based on concern over unforeseen effects. Reforms which mainly eliminate needless difficulties ought to take account of such arguments. Reform efforts are further hampered by habit and, for many languages, a lack of a central auth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element. Spellings originated as transcriptions of the sounds of spoken language according to the alphabetic principle. They remain largely reflective of the sounds, although fully phonemic spelling is an ideal that most languages' orthographies only approximate, some more closely than others. This is true for various reasons, including that pronunciation changes over time in all languages, yet spellings as visual norms may resist change. In addition, words from other languages may be adopted without being adapted to the spelling system, and different meanings of a word or homophones may be deliberately spelled in different ways to differentiate them v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
