An orthography is a set of conventions for how to write a language. It includes
rules of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis,
and punctuation. Most significant languages in the modern
era are written down, and for most such languages a standard orthography has
developed, often based on a standard variety of the language, and thus
exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. Sometimes there may
be variation in a language's orthography, as between American and
British spelling in the case of English orthography. If a language uses multiple
writing systems, it may have distinct orthographies, as is the case with
Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian, Inuktitut, Azerbaijani and Uzbek. In some cases
orthography is regulated by bodies such as language academies, although for many
languages there are no such authorities, and orthography develops through more
democratic processes. Orthography is distinct from typography,
which is concerned with principles of typesetting.
Etymology and meaning The English word orthography dates from
the 15th century. It comes from the French orthographie, from Latin
orthographia, which derives from Greek ὀρθός orthós, "correct", and γράφειν
gráphein, "to write". Orthography is largely concerned with
matters of spelling, and in particular the relationship between phonemes and
graphemes in a language. Other elements that may be considered part of
orthography include hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis,
and punctuation. Orthography thus describes or defines the set of symbols
used in writing a language, and the rules about how to use those symbols.
Most natural languages developed as oral languages, and writing systems have
usually been crafted or adapted as ways of representing the spoken language. The
rules for doing this tend to become standardized for a given language,
leading to the development of an orthography that is generally considered
"correct". In linguistics the term orthography is often used to refer to
any method of writing a language, without judgment 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 thoroughly standardized, prescriptively
correct, way of writing a language. A distinction may be made here between
etic and emic viewpoints: the purely descriptive 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 Orthographic units, such as letters of
an alphabet, are technically called graphemes. These are a type of
abstraction, analogous to the phonemes 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. For example,
different forms of the letter "b" are all considered to represent a single
grapheme in the orthography of, say, English.
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, and from phonetic transcription, which is placed
between square brackets. Types
The writing systems 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, syllabic, and alphabetic.
Many writing systems combine features of more than one of these types, and a
number of detailed classifications have been proposed. For a full discussion,
see Writing system: Functional classification of writing systems.
Correspondence with pronunciation Orthographies that use alphabets and
syllabaries are based on the principle that the written symbols correspond to
units of sound of the spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and
syllables in the latter. However, in virtually all cases, this correspondence
is not exact. Different languages' orthographies offer different degrees of
correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. English orthography, for
example, is highly irregular, whereas the orthographies of languages such as
Russian, Spanish and Finnish represent pronunciation much more faithfully,
although the correspondence between letters and phonemes is still not exact.
Serbian orthography is remarkably consistent: approximation of the
principle "one letter per sound". An orthography in which the
correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are highly complex or
inconsistent is called a deep orthography. An orthography with
relatively simple and consistent correspondences is called shallow.
One of the main reasons for which spelling and pronunciation deviate is
that sound changes taking place in the spoken language are not always reflected
in the orthography, and hence spellings correspond to historical rather than
present-day pronunciation. One consequence of this is that many
spellings come to reflect a word's morphophonemic structure rather than its
purely phonemic structure. This is discussed further at Phonemic
orthography: Morphophonemic features. The syllabary systems of Japanese are
examples of almost perfectly shallow orthographies – the kana correspond with
almost perfect consistency to the spoken syllables, although with a few
exceptions where symbols reflect historical or morphophonemic features:
notably the use of ぢ ji and づ zu when the character is a voicing of an
underlying ち or つ, and the use of は, を, and へ to represent the sounds わ, お, and
え, as relics of historical kana usage. The Korean hangul system was also
originally an extremely shallow orthography, but as a representation of
the modern language it frequently also reflects 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. 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 Latin alphabet for many languages, or Japanese
Katakana 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, diacritics, or the addition of completely new symbols or of
symbols from another alphabet, such as the rune þ in Icelandic.
See also References
Further reading Cahill, Michael; Rice, Keren. Developing
Orthographies for Unwritten Languages. Dallas, Tx: SIL International. ISBN
978-1-55671-347-7. Smalley, W.A. 1964. Orthography studies:
articles on new writing systems. Venezky, Richard L.; Trabasso, Tom. From
orthography to pedagogy: essays in honor of Richard L. Venezky. Hillsdale, N.J:
Lawrence Erlbaum. ISBN 0-8058-5089-9. OCLC 475457315.
External links Videos: The History and Impact of
Writing in the West Phonemic awareness page of the CTER wiki
lonestar.texas.netlearn-as/ orthography of Old English