Phonemic orthography
A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond consistently to the language's phonemes (the smallest units of speech that can differentiate words). 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; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Esperanto, Korean, Swahili and Georgian orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
In less formal terms, a language with a highly phonemic orthography may be described as having regular spelling. Another terminology is that of deep and shallow orthographies, in which the depth of an orthography is the degree to which it diverges from being truly phonemic. The concept can also be applied to nonalphabetic writing systems like syllabaries.
Ideal phonemic orthography[edit]
In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence (bijection) between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language, and each phoneme would invariably be represented by its corresponding grapheme. So the spelling of a word would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation, and conversely, a speaker knowing the pronunciation of a word would be able to infer its spelling without any doubt. That ideal situation is rare but exists in a few languages.
A disputed example of an ideally phonemic orthography is the Serbo-Croatian language. In its alphabet (Latin as well as Serbian Cyrillic alphabet), there are 30 graphemes, each uniquely corresponding to one of the phonemes. This seemingly perfect yet simple phonemic orthography was achieved in the 19th century—the Cyrillic alphabet first in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, and the Latin alphabet in 1830 by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj. However, both Gaj's Latin alphabet and Serbian Cyrillic do not distinguish short and long vowels, and non-tonic (the short one is written), rising, and falling tones that Serbo-Croatian has. In Serbo-Croatian, the tones and vowel lengths were optionally written as (in Latin) ⟨e⟩, ⟨ē⟩, ⟨è⟩, ⟨é⟩, ⟨ȅ⟩, and ⟨ȇ⟩, especially in dictionaries.
Another such ideal phonemic orthography is native to Esperanto, employing the language creator L. L. Zamenhof's then-pronounced principle "one letter, one sound".[1]
Alphabetic orthographies often have features that are morphophonemic rather than purely phonemic. This means that the spelling reflects to some extent the underlying morphological structure of the words, not only their pronunciation. Hence different forms of a morpheme (minimum meaningful unit of language) are often spelt identically or similarly in spite of differences in their pronunciation. That is often for historical reasons; the morphophonemic spelling reflects a previous pronunciation from before historical sound changes that caused the variation in pronunciation of a given morpheme. Such spellings can assist in the recognition of words when reading.
Some examples of morphophonemic features in orthography are described below.
Korean hangul has changed over the centuries from a highly phonemic to a largely morphophonemic orthography. Japanese kana are almost completely phonemic but have a few morphophonemic aspects, notably in the use of ぢ di and づ du (rather than じ ji and ず zu, their pronunciation in standard Tokyo dialect), when the character is a voicing of an underlying ち or つ. That is from the rendaku sound change combined with the yotsugana merger of formally different morae. The Russian orthography is also mostly morphophonemic, because it does not reflect vowel reduction, consonant assimilation and final-obstruent devoicing. Also, some consonant combinations have silent consonants.
Defective orthographies[edit]
A defective orthography is one that is not capable of representing all the phonemes or phonemic distinctions in a language. An example of such a deficiency in English orthography is the lack of distinction between the voiced and voiceless "th" phonemes (/ð/ and /θ/, respectively), occurring in words like this /ˈðɪs/ (voiced) and thin /ˈθɪn/ (voiceless) respectively, with both written ⟨th⟩.
Realignment of orthography[edit]
With time, pronunciations change and spellings become out of date, as has happened to English and French. In order to maintain a phonemic orthography such a system would need periodic updating, as has been attempted by various language regulators and proposed by other spelling reformers.
Sometimes the pronunciation of a word changes to match its spelling; this is called a spelling pronunciation. This is most common with loanwords, but occasionally occurs in the case of established native words too.
In some English personal names and place names, the relationship between the spelling of the name and its pronunciation is so distant that associations between phonemes and graphemes cannot be readily identified. Moreover, in many other words, the pronunciation has subsequently evolved from a fixed spelling, so that it has to be said that the phonemes represent the graphemes rather than vice versa. And in much technical jargon, the primary medium of communication is the written language rather than the spoken language, so the phonemes represent the graphemes, and it is unimportant how the word is pronounced. Moreover, the sounds which literate people perceive being heard in a word are significantly influenced by the actual spelling of the word.[4]
Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin-based a Turkish alphabet.