Orthography
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An orthography is a set of conventions for
writing Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of language. A writing system includes a particular set of symbols called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language. Every written language ...
a
language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
, including norms of
spelling Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element. Spelli ...
,
punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...
, word boundaries,
capitalization Capitalization ( North American spelling; also British spelling in Oxford) or capitalisation (Commonwealth English; all other meanings) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in ...
,
hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with t ...
ation, and emphasis. Most national and international languages have an established
writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...
that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less
dialect A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...
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 Noah Webster (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education" ...
's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between
American and British spelling Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and America ...
(e.g. ''honor'' and ''honour''). Orthographic norms develop through social and political influence at various levels, such as encounters with print in education, the workplace, and the state. Some nations have established language academies in an attempt to regulate aspects of the national language, including its orthography—such as the
Académie Française An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of tertiary education. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 386 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the go ...
in France and the
Royal Spanish Academy The Royal Spanish Academy (, ; ) is Spain's official royal institution with a mission to ensure the stability of the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and is affiliated with national language academies in 22 other Hispanophon ...
in Spain. No such authority exists for most languages, including English. Some non-state organizations, such as newspapers of record and
academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...
s, choose greater orthographic homogeneity by enforcing a particular
style guide A style guide is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. A book-length style guide is often called a style manual or a manual of style. A short style guide, typically ranging from several to several dozen page ...
or spelling standard such as
Oxford spelling Oxford spelling (also ''Oxford English Dictionary'' spelling, Oxford style, or Oxford English spelling) is a spelling standard, named after its use by the Oxford University Press, that prescribes the use of British spelling in combination with ...
.


Terminology

The English word ''orthography'' is first attested in the 15th century, ultimately from ( 'correct') and ( 'to write'). Orthography in phonetic writing systems is often concerned with matters of
spelling Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element. Spelli ...
, i.e. the correspondence between written
grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...
s and the
phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
s found in speech. Other elements that may be considered part of orthography include
hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with t ...
ation,
capitalization Capitalization ( North American spelling; also British spelling in Oxford) or capitalisation (Commonwealth English; all other meanings) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in ...
, word boundaries, emphasis, and
punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...
. Thus, ''orthography'' describes or defines the symbols used in writing, and the conventions that regulate their use. Most
natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...
s developed as oral languages and
writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...
s have usually been crafted or adapted as ways of representing the spoken language. The rules for doing this tend to become
standardized Standardization (American English) or standardisation (British English) is the process of implementing and developing technical standards based on the consensus of different parties that include firms, users, interest groups, standards organiza ...
for a given language, leading to the development of an orthography that is generally considered "correct". In
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, ''orthography'' often refers to any method of writing a language without judgement as to right and wrong, with a scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a spectrum of strength of convention. The original sense of the word, though, implies a dichotomy of correct and incorrect, and the word is still most often used to refer specifically to a standardized prescriptive manner of writing. A distinction is made between
emic and etic In anthropology, folkloristics, linguistics, and the social and behavioral sciences, ''emic'' () and ''etic'' () refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained. The ''emic'' approach is an insider's perspective, which loo ...
viewpoints, with the emic approach taking account of perceptions of correctness among language users, and the etic approach being purely descriptive, considering only the empirical qualities of any system as used.


Units and notation

Orthographic units, such as letters of an
alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
, are conceptualized as
grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...
s. These are a type of
abstraction Abstraction is a process where general rules and concepts are derived from the use and classifying of specific examples, literal (reality, real or Abstract and concrete, concrete) signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An abstraction" ...
, analogous to the
phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
s of spoken languages; different physical forms of written symbols are considered to represent the same grapheme if the differences between them are not significant for meaning. Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of
glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...
s that are all functionally equivalent. For example, in written English (or other languages using the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...
), there are two different physical representations (glyphs) of the
lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...
Latin letter '' a'': and . Since the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be
allograph In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious exa ...
s of the same grapheme, which can be written . The italic and
boldface In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech. Methods and use The most common methods in We ...
forms are also allographic. Graphemes or sequences of them are sometimes placed between angle brackets, as in or . This distinguishes them from phonemic transcription, which is placed between slashes (, ), and from
phonetic transcription Phonetic transcription (also known as Phonetic script or Phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phonetics'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the ...
, which is placed between square brackets (, ).


Types

The
writing systems A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independe ...
on which orthographies are based can be divided into a number of types, depending on what type of unit each symbol serves to represent. The principal types are ''
logographic In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese c ...
'' (with symbols representing words or morphemes), '' syllabic'' (with symbols representing syllables), and ''
alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
ic'' (with symbols roughly representing phonemes). Many writing systems combine features of more than one of these types, and a number of detailed classifications have been proposed. Japanese is an example of a writing system that can be written using a combination of logographic
kanji are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are ...
characters and syllabic
hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", ...
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 fr ...
characters; as with many non-alphabetic languages, alphabetic
romaji The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as . Japanese is normally written in a combination of logogram, logographic characters borrowe ...
characters may also be used as needed.


Correspondence with pronunciation

Orthographies that use
alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
s and
syllabaries In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) morae which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (option ...
are based on the principle that written graphemes correspond to units of sound of the spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and
syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
s in the latter. In virtually all cases, this correspondence is not exact. Different languages' orthographies offer different degrees of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. 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, consistent correspondences (i.e. more
bijective In mathematics, a bijection, bijective function, or one-to-one correspondence is a function between two sets such that each element of the second set (the codomain) is the image of exactly one element of the first set (the domain). Equival ...
, or one-to-one) between spelling and pronunciation is called ''shallow'' (and the language has ''regular spelling''). The Navajo alphabet is a deep orthography. The Navajo language is a complex language system that relies on relatively subtle phonetics, including distinct tones and nasalization. The script likewise exhibits complexities representing the language, which presents challenges for people trying to acquire literacy. Spanish is an alphabet with shallow orthography; there is clear one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. Another is the
Hawaiian alphabet The Hawaiian alphabet (in ) is an alphabet used to write Hawaiian language, Hawaiian. It was adapted from the English alphabet in the early 19th century by American missionaries to print a bible in the Hawaiian language. Origins In 1778, Briti ...
, which only includes eight vowel letters and five consonant letters, for a total of thirteen. This allows literacy to be acquired quickly compared to deeper orthographies.


Developing literacy

According to studies, children learn to read and write more quickly in shallow orthographies, such as Spanish, compared to deeper orthographies, like English. Orthographic mapping is the process of associating phonemes with (graphemes. By establishing these strong connections, children can easily decode unfamiliar words with what they already know. Orthographic mapping also helps with vocabulary development and reading fluency. Although shallow orthography is easier to grasp, researchers have argued that deeper orthographies make it challenging for individuals with
dyslexia Dyslexia (), previously known as word blindness, is a learning disability that affects either reading or writing. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, wri ...
to learn.


Defective orthographies

An orthography based on a correspondence to phonemes may sometimes lack characters to represent 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 , which represents two different phonemes (as in ''then'' and ''thin'') and replaced the old letters and . A more systematic example is that of
abjad An abjad ( or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introd ...
s like the
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
and
Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
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
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...
for many languages, or Japanese
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 fr ...
for non-Japanese words—it often proves defective in representing the new language's phonemes. Sometimes this problem is addressed by the use of such devices as digraphs (such as and in English, where pairs of letters represent single sounds),
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s (like the
caron A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...
on the letters and , which represent those same sounds in
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 *Czech (surnam ...
), or the addition of completely new symbols (as some languages have introduced the letter to the Latin alphabet) or of symbols from another alphabet, such as the
rune Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets, known as runic rows, runic alphabets or futharks (also, see '' futhark'' vs ''runic alphabet''), native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were primarily used to represent a sound value (a ...
in Icelandic. After the classical period, Greek developed a lowercase letter system with diacritics to enable foreigners to learn pronunciation and grammatical features. As pronunciation of letters changed over time, the diacritics were reduced to representing the stressed syllable. In Modern Greek typesetting, this system has been simplified to have only a single accent to indicate which syllable is stressed.


See also

*
Cursive Cursive (also known as joined-up writing) is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionality and m ...
*
Keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keybo ...
* Lateral masking * List of language disorders *
Palaeography Palaeography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, UK) or paleography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, US) (ultimately from , , 'old', and , , 'to write') is the study and academic disciplin ...
*
Penmanship Penmanship is the technique of writing with the hand using a writing instrument. Today, this is most commonly done with a pen, or pencil, but throughout history has included many different writing implement, implements. The various generic a ...
*
Prescription and description Linguistic prescription is the establishment of rules defining publicly preferred Usage (language), usage of language, including rules of spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard ...


References


Works cited

* * * * * **


Further reading

* * *


External links

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