| Orthography |
Website Links For Orthography |
Information AboutOrthography |
|
Orthography includes the Writing System of a language. English, for example, has an Alphabet of 26 letters for both Consonant s and Vowel s, but no glyph for Stress . However, each English letter may represent more than one sound, and each English sound ( Phoneme ) may be written by more than one letter. An example of an orthographic rule describing how letters are used is I Before E Except After C ; another is that the Plural is written with the letter ''s'' regardless of whether it is pronounced as an as in ''cats,'' or as a [z , as in ''dogs.'' In addition, combinations of letters called Digraph s, such as ''th,'' represent single sounds in English orthography. Other languages which use the same alphabet as English may not use the same digraphs. One of the most complex orthographies is that of Japanese , which uses a combination of several thousand logographic glyphs (Chinese characters ''Hanzi'') called '' Kanji ,'' two Syllabaries called Katakana and Hiragana , and the Latin alphabet, Rōmaji . All words in Japanese can be written in either katakana, hiragana, or rōmaji. Most words also have a kanji form. The choice of which type of writing to use depends on a number of factors, including standard conventions, readability, and stylistic choices. An orthography may be described as 'efficient' if it has one glyph per speech sound (phoneme) and ''vice versa,'' but few systems are perfect. For example, the spelling of the German personal name ''Tzschaetzsch'' is inefficient, since it uses twelve letters to represent five phonemes; a more efficient orthography might represent it as ''Čäč'' or ''Cεc''. An orthography that does not represent all the sounds of a language, such as that of Italian or Arabic , is called ' Defective '. Both inefficient and defective orthographies may motivate Spelling Reform .
See also
External link
Reference
|