Spelling

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Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. [1] Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element.

Contents

Spellings originated as transcriptions of the sounds of speech according to the alphabetic principle. Fully phonemic orthography is usually only approximated, due to factors including changes in pronunciation over time, and the borrowing of vocabulary from other languages without adapting its spelling. Homophones may be spelled differently on purpose in order to disambiguate words that would otherwise have identical spellings.

Standards and conventions

Standardization of spelling is connected with the development of writing and the establishment of modern standard dialects. [2] [3] Languages with established orthography are those languages that enjoy an official status and a degree of institutional support in a country. Therefore, normative spelling is a relatively recent development linked to the compiling of dictionaries (in many languages, special spelling dictionaries, also called orthographic dictionaries, are compiled, showing prescribed spelling of words but not their meanings), the founding of national academies and other institutions of language maintenance, including widespread education and literacy, and often does not apply to minority and regional languages.

In countries or regions where there is an authoritative language academy, such as France, the Netherlands, and the German-speaking areas, reforms have occasionally been introduced (not always successfully) so that spelling better matches the changing pronunciation.

Examples are:

There have occasionally been English-language spelling reform proposals, at least since the 16th century, but they have made little impact apart from a few spellings preferred by Noah Webster having contributed to American and British English spelling differences.

Methodology

Learning

Learning proper spelling by rote is a traditional element of elementary education, and divergence from standard spelling is often perceived as an indicator of low intelligence, illiteracy, or lower class standing. [4]

Spelling tests are commonly used to assess a student's mastery of the words in the spelling lessons the student has received so far. They can also be an effective practice method. Spelling bees are competitions to determine the best speller of a group. Prominent spelling bees are sometimes even televised, such as the National Spelling Bee in the United States.

Alteration

Divergent spelling is a popular advertising technique, used to attract attention or to render a trademark "suggestive" rather than "merely descriptive", or to evade copyright restrictions. The pastry chains Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme, for example, employ non-standard spellings.

Misspellings

A misspelling of purchased on a service station sign. Misspelling.purchase.arp.500pix.jpg
A misspelling of purchased on a service station sign.

While some words admit multiple spellings, some spellings are not considered standard. These are commonly called "misspellings". A misspelled word can be a series of letters that represents no correctly spelled word of the same language at all (such as "leik" for "like") or a correct spelling of another word (such as writing "here" when one means "hear", or "no" when one means "know"). Misspellings of the latter type are called "atomic typos", and they can easily make their way into printed material because they are not caught by simple computer spell checkers. Deliberate misspellings that emphasize the pronunciation of a regional dialect are part of eye dialect (such as writing "'Murica'" instead of "America", or "helluva" instead of "hell of a").

Misspellings may be due to accidental typing errors (e.g. the transposition error teh for the), lack of knowledge of the normative spelling, or lack of concern over spelling rules at all. Whether or not a word is misspelled may depend on context and the orthographic conventions adopted, as is the case with American/British English distinctions. Misspelling can also be a matter of opinion when variant spellings are accepted by some and not by others. For example, "miniscule" (for "minuscule") is a misspelling to many, [5] and yet it is listed as an acceptable variant in some dictionaries. [6] [7]

A well-known internet scam involves the registration of domain names that are deliberate misspellings of well-known corporate names to mislead or defraud. The practice is commonly known as "typosquatting". [8]

Notable English misspellings in history

English

English orthography has a broad degree of standardization. However, there are several ways to spell almost every sound, and most letters have several variants of pronunciation depending on their position in the word and context. Therefore, some spelling mistakes are common even among native speakers. [14] This is mainly due to large number of words that were borrowed from other languages with no successful attempts of complete spelling reform. [15] Most spelling rules usually do not reflect phonetic changes that have taken place since the end of the 15th century (for example, the Great Vowel Shift). [16]

Other languages

Portuguese spelling is not strictly phonematic. It is associated with an extension of the Portuguese language and the emergence of numerous regional and dialect variants. In 2009 the global reform of the Portuguese language was initiated to eliminate 98% of inconsistencies in spelling between various countries. [17]

the orthography of the Icelandic language is based on etymological principle (as English is); thus the Icelanders themselves experience difficulties in writing. [18] [19] The modern Icelandic alphabet is based on the standard introduced by the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask.

The fundamental principles of the Spanish orthography are phonological and etymological, that is why there are several letters with identical phonemes. [20] Beginning from the 17th century, various options for orthographic reforms were suggested that would create a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme, but all of them were rejected. Most modern proposals to reform spelling are limited to the removal of homophone letters that are preserved for etymological reasons. [21]

In many languages, types of mis-spelling arise from features of those languages which are not present in English: for example,

See also

English spelling

Other languages

Related Research Articles

English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H</span> 8th letter of the Latin alphabet

H, or h, is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch, or regionally haitch, plural haitches.

An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Y</span> Penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet

Y, or y, is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. According to some authorities, it is the sixth vowel letter of the English alphabet. Its name in English is wye, plural wyes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logogram</span> Grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme

In a written language, a logogram, also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are phonemic: their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homophone</span> Word that has identical pronunciation as another word, but differs in meaning

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning and sometimes also in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example rose (flower) and rose, or spelled differently, as in rain, reign, and rein. The term homophone sometimes applies to units longer or shorter than words, for example a phrase, letter, or groups of letters which are pronounced the same as a counterpart. Any unit with this property is said to be homophonous.

A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples are the German orthography reform of 1996 and the on-off Portuguese spelling reform of 1990, which is still being ratified.

The circumflex is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin: circumflexus "bent around"—a translation of the Greek: περισπωμένη.

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. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russian orthography</span>

Russian orthography is an orthographic tradition formally considered to encompass spelling and punctuation. Russian spelling, which is mostly phonemic in practice, is a mix of morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the models of French and German orthography.

For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. Such spelling reform seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle. Common motives for spelling reform include making learning quicker, making learning cheaper, and making English more useful as an international auxiliary language.

In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. In linguistics, a silent letter is often symbolised with a null sign U+2205EMPTY SET. Null is an unpronounced or unwritten segment. The symbol resembles the Scandinavian letter Ø and other symbols.

L-vocalization, in linguistics, is a process by which a lateral approximant sound such as, or, perhaps more often, velarized, is replaced by a vowel or a semivowel.

A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography.

The Portuguese language began to be used regularly in documents and poetry around the 12th century. Unlike neighboring Romance languages that adopted formal orthographies by the 18th century, the Portuguese language did not have a uniform spelling standard until the 20th century. The formation of the Portuguese Republic in 1911 was motivation for the establishment of orthographic reform in Portugal and its overseas territories and colonies. Brazil would adopt an orthographic standard based on, but not identical to, the Portuguese standard a few decades later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Portuguese orthography</span> Alphabet and spelling

Portuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis was abolished by the last Orthography Agreement. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes.

Czech orthography is a system of rules for proper formal writing (orthography) in Czech. The earliest form of separate Latin script specifically designed to suit Czech was devised by Czech theologian and church reformist Jan Hus, the namesake of the Hussite movement, in one of his seminal works, De orthographia bohemica.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard and soft G</span> Pronunciation of "G" in Latin-based orthographies

In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, the letter ⟨g⟩ is used in different contexts to represent two distinct phonemes that in English are called hard and soft ⟨g⟩. The sound of a hard ⟨g⟩ is usually the voiced velar plosive while the sound of a soft ⟨g⟩ may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft ⟨g⟩ is the affricate, as in general, giant, and gym. A ⟨g⟩ at the end of a word usually renders a hard ⟨g⟩, while if a soft rendition is intended it would be followed by a silent ⟨e⟩.

Romanisation of Bengali is the representation of written Bengali language in the Latin script. Various romanisation systems for Bengali are used, most of which do not perfectly represent Bengali pronunciation. While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, none has been adopted with the same degree of uniformity as Japanese or Sanskrit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SoundSpel</span> English spelling reform proposal

SoundSpel is a regular and mostly phonemic English-language spelling reform proposal. It uses a 26-letter alphabet that is fully compatible with QWERTY keyboards. Though SoundSpel was originally based on American English, it can represent dialectal pronunciation, including British English. With roots extending as far back as 1910 but largely complete by 1986, SoundSpel was developed "in response to the widely held conviction that English spelling is more complex than it needs to be." The American Literacy Council has endorsed the reform because anglophones can easily read it. Additionally, according to its proponents, "[SoundSpel] is fully compatible with traditional spelling and can be mixed with it in any proportion desired."

References

  1. Coulmas, F. (1996), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, Oxford:Blackwell
  2. Ulrich Ammon (2004), "Standard variety", Sociolinguistics, vol. 1, Walter de Gruyter, pp. 273–283, ISBN   978-3-11-014189-4
  3. František Trávníček (1940), Nástroj myšlení a dorozumělní: hrst úvah o spisovné češtině (in Czech), F. Borový, p. 206
  4. 1992: Gaffe with an 'e' at the end, by Paul Mickle / The Trentonian
  5. "minuscule", Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary; states that this spelling is "widely regarded as an error"
  6. "minuscule", The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
  7. "minuscule", Cambridge Dictionary of American English
  8. "Typosquatters Act May Apply to Misspelling Domain Names to Mislead Surfers", Shari Claire Lewis, New York Law Journal, September 15, 2004,
  9. Oldfield, Molly; Mitchinson, John (15 Apr 2009). "QI: Quite Interesting facts about 100". Telegraph. Archived from the original on Jan 29, 2010.
  10. "Define Referer". Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on Mar 3, 2010.
  11. Robinson, J. (2005). "Sequim History" (PDF). City of Sequim, Washington. Archived from the original (PDF) on Oct 3, 2008. Retrieved July 24, 2008.
  12. Town of Quartzsite 2003 General Plan [ dead link ]
  13. Norbury, J. K. W. Word Formation in the Noun and Adjective.
  14. "Second Grade Spelling Words". primarylearning.org. Retrieved June 14, 2021.
  15. "The Relationship between Spelling and Pronunciation in English Language" (PDF). languageinindia.com. Retrieved June 14, 2021.
  16. "English language". britannica.com. Retrieved June 14, 2021.
  17. "Then and Now: The Brazilian Portuguese Spelling Reform". unitedlanguagegroup.com. Retrieved June 14, 2021.
  18. "Baráttan gegn málvillum" (PDF). skemman.is. Retrieved June 14, 2021.
  19. "Skólamálfræði Hver er hún og hver ætti hún að vera?" (PDF). opinvisindi.is. Retrieved June 14, 2021.
  20. "SPANISH ALPHABET". donquijote.org. Retrieved June 14, 2021.
  21. "Spanish Homophones and Homographs". thoughtco.com. Retrieved June 14, 2021.

Further reading