Phonemic orthography

Last updated
Sample of text written in the Shavian alphabet, a proposed phonemic orthography for English Shavian in Shavian.svg
Sample of text written in the Shavian alphabet, a proposed phonemic orthography for English

A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes. [1] Phonemic orthographies have the highest possible level of orthographic depth, as they have exact letter to phoneme correspondence.

Contents

For a systemic analysis of the phoneme/grapheme correspondence, Petr Sgall distinguishes two conditions, both of which are to be satisfied for a phonemic orthography: [2]

Under these conditions, even orthographies with exceptionally high orthographic depth, such as Italian and Welsh, are excluded due to their use of digraphs, which change the pronunciation of some grapheme based on surrounding graphemes. For example, the grapheme ⟨ n ⟩ is usually pronounced as /n/ in Welsh, but the digraph ⟨nh⟩ is pronounced as /n̥/; [3] [4] therefore, ⟨n⟩ does not always represent the same phoneme, and thus the orthography is not fully phonemic.

Phonetic orthography

In the past, the term phonetic orthography was used to refer to various proposals of phonetic English-language spelling reforms, [5] e.g., by J.I.D. Hinds [6] [7] or Tobias Witmer. [8]

On the other hand, Morris Swadesh defined "phonetic orthography" or "phonetic alphabet" as a writing system to make a phonetic record using symbols for "selected characteristic points in the total range of possible speech sounds", [1] : 365  this is more commonly referred to as "phonetic transcription".

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Morris, Swadesh (June 1934). "The Phonemic Principle". Language . 10 (2). Linguistic Society of America: 117–129.
  2. ↑ Petr Sgall, "Towards a Theory of Phonemic Orthography", In book: Orthography and Phonology, pp. 1-30, p. 10
  3. ↑ Edwards, Thomas (1847). A Brief Analysis of Welsh Orthography. p. 10.
  4. ↑ Ball, Martin J. (1984). "Phonetics for phonology". In Ball, M. J.; Jones, G. E. (eds.). Welsh Phonology: Selected Readings. Cardiff: UWP. ISBN   0-7083-0861-9.
  5. ↑ Wolman, David (2009). Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling. HarperCollins.
  6. ↑ Smyth, B. B. (1893-10-13). "A Phonetic Orthography". Science. 22 (558). American Association for the Advancement of Science: 207–208. JSTOR   1766246.
  7. ↑ Hinds, J.I.D. (1893-07-21). "A New Orthography". Science. 22 (546). American Association for the Advancement of Science: 34–35. JSTOR   1766199.
  8. ↑ Witmer, Tobais (1876). A System of Phonetic Spelling
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.