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The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. A writing system is a type of Symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in Language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography. The Kurdish alphabet is a Writing system for the Kurdish language. ) Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós ("correct") and γράφειν gráphein ("to write"). Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly Orthography is distinct from typography. Typography is the art and techniques of arranging type, Type design, and modifying type Glyphs Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety

Orthography describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used, and the rules about how to write these symbols. In Typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation Depending on the nature of the writing system, the rules may include punctuation, spelling and capitalization. Spelling is the Writing of a Word or words with the necessary letters and Diacritics present in an accepted standard order Capitalization (or capitalisation &mdash see spelling differences) is writing a word with its first letter as a Majuscule (upper case letter

While "orthography" colloquially is often used synonymously with spelling, spelling is only part of orthography. A colloquialism is an expression not used in formal speech, writing or Paralinguistics. This article deals with the general meaning of the term "synonym" Spelling is the Writing of a Word or words with the necessary letters and Diacritics present in an accepted standard order

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Efficiency

An orthography may be described as "efficient" if it has one grapheme per phoneme (distinctive speech sound) and vice versa. In Typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU An orthography may also have varying degrees of efficiency for reading or writing. For example, diverse letter, digraph, and diacritic shapes contribute to diverse word shapes, which aid fluent reading, while heavy use of apostrophes or diacritics makes writing slow, and the use of symbols not found on standard keyboards makes computer or cell phone input awkward. These are all considerations in the design of a writing system.

Typology of spelling systems

Phonemic orthography

A phonemic orthography is an orthography that has a dedicated symbol or sequence of symbols for each phoneme (distinctive speech sound) and vice versa. A phonemic orthography is a Writing system where the written Graphemes correspond to Phonemes the spoken sounds of the language The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU Many alphabetic scripts are fairly close to being phonemic, though English is a notorious exception.

Morpho-phonemic orthography

A morpho-phonemic orthography considers not only what is phonemic, as above, but also the underlying structure of the words. Morphophonology (also morphophonemics, morphonology) is a branch of Linguistics which studies The phonological structure For example, in English, /s/ and /z/ are distinct phonemes, so in a phonemic orthography the plurals of cat and dog would be cats and dogz. However, English orthography recognizes that the /s/ sound in cats and the /z/ sound in dogs are the same element (archiphoneme), automatically pronounced differently depending on its environment, and therefore writes them the same despite their differing pronunciation. The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU German and Russian are morpho-phonemic in this sense, whereas Turkish is purely phonemic. Korean hangul has changed over the centuries from a highly phonemic to a largely morpho-phonemic orthography, and there are moves in Turkey to make that script more morpho-phonemic as well.

Defectiveness

A "defective orthography" is one in which there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes in the language, such as those of Italian, English or Arabic. A defective script is a script that does not represent all the phonemic distinctions of a language A letter is an element in an Alphabetic system of writing such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Most languages of western Europe (which are written with the Latin alphabet), as well as the modern Greek language (written with the Greek alphabet), have defective scripts. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly The Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early In some of these, there are sounds with more than one possible spelling, usually for etymological or morphophonemic reasons (like /dʒ/ in English, which can be written with "j", "g", "dj", "dg", or "ge"). Etymology is the study of the History of Words &mdash when they entered a language from what source and how their form and meaning have changed over time In other cases, the letters in the alphabet are not enough to write all phonemes. The remaining ones must then be represented by using such devices as diacritics, digraphs that reuse letters with different values (like "th" in English, whose sound value is normally not /t/ + /h/), or simply inferred from the context (for example the short vowels in abjads like the Arabic and the Hebrew alphabet, which are normally left unwritten). A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation A digraph, bigraph, or digram is a pair of characters used to write one Phoneme (distinct sound or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond In Phonetics, a vowel is a Sound in spoken Language, such as English ah! or oh!, pronounced with an open Vocal tract An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language.

Another term to describe this characteristic is "deep orthography". (Note that the term "defective orthography" should not indicate that the writing system is flawed. ) Deep orthographies are writing systems that do not have a full correspondence between the spoken phoneme and the written grapheme (as listed above). Shallow orthographies, however, have a one-to-one relationship between graphemes and phonemes. The phonetic writing of Japanese (ex. hiragana) is an example of shallow orthography.

Complex orthography

Complex orthographies often combine different types of scripts and/or utilize many different complex punctuation rules. Some widely accepted examples of languages with complex orthographies include Thai, Japanese, and Khmer. The Thai Alphabet (อักษรไทย àksŏn thai) is used to write the Thai language and other minority languages in Thailand The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts Kanji, characters of Chinese origin, Hiragana The Khmer script (អក្ខរក្រមខេមរភាសា âkkhârâkrâm khémârâ phéasa informally aksar Khmer អក្សរខ្មែរ is used to write the

See also

References

External links

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Dictionary

orthography

-noun

  1. The study of correct spelling according to established usage.
  2. The aspect of language study concerned with letters and their sequences in words.
  3. Spelling; the method of representing a language or the sounds of language by written symbols.
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