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Aphonemic orthography is anorthography (system for writing alanguage) in which thegraphemes (written symbols) correspond consistently to the language'sphonemes (the smallest units of speech that can differentiate words), or more generally to the language'sdiaphonemes. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based onalphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is.English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic.
In less formally precise terms, a language with a highly phonemic orthography may be described as havingregular spelling orphonetic spelling. Another terminology is that ofdeep 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 likesyllabaries.
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. In such an ideal case, the spelling of a word would transparently and unambiguously reflect its pronunciation, and conversely, knowing a word's pronunciation would allow one to infer its spelling without uncertainty. While rare, this level of phoneme-grapheme consistency does occur in Serbian and Croatian.[citation needed]
There are two distinct types of deviation from the phonemic ideal. In the first case, the exact one-to-one correspondence may be lost (for example, some phoneme may be represented by adigraph instead of a single letter), but the "regularity" is retained: there is still analgorithm (but a more complex one) for predicting the spelling from the pronunciation and vice versa. In the second case, true irregularity is introduced, as certain words come to be spelled and pronounced according to different rules from others, and prediction of spelling from pronunciation and vice versa is no longer possible.
Pronunciation and spelling still correspond in a predictable way
Examples:
sch versuss-ch inRomansch
ng versusn +g inWelsh
ch versusçh inManx Gaelic: this is a slightly different case where the same digraph is used for two different single phonemes.
ai versusaï inFrench
This is often due to the use of an alphabet that was originally used for a different language (theLatin alphabet in these examples) and so does not have single letters available for all the phonemes used in the current language (although some orthographies use devices such asdiacritics to increase the number of available letters).
Pronunciation and spelling do not always correspond in a predictable way
In Bengali, the letters, 'শ', 'ষ', and ' স, correspond to the same sound /ʃ/. Moreover, consonant clusters , 'স্ব', 'স্য' , 'শ্ব ', 'শ্ম', 'শ্য', 'ষ্ম ', 'ষ্য', also often have the same pronunciation, /ʃ/ or /ʃʃ/.
Most orthographies do not reflect the changes in pronunciation known assandhi in which pronunciation is affected by adjacent sounds in neighboring words (writtenSanskrit and otherIndian languages, however, reflect such changes). A language may also use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items such as the Japanesehiragana andkatakana syllabaries (and the different treatment in English orthography of words derived from Latin and Greek).
Alphabetic orthographies often have features that aremorphophonemic rather than purely phonemic. This means that the spelling reflects to some extent the underlyingmorphological structure of the words, not only their pronunciation. Hence different forms of amorpheme (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 historicalsound 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.
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 therendaku sound change combined with theyotsugana merger of formally different morae. TheRussian 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.
Adefective 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 likethis/ˈðɪs/ (voiced) andthin/ˈθɪn/ (voiceless) respectively, with both written⟨th⟩.
With time,pronunciations change and spellings become out of date, as has happened to English andFrench. In order to maintain a phonemic orthography such a system would need periodic updating, as has been attempted by variouslanguage regulators and proposed by otherspelling reformers.
Sometimes the pronunciation of a word changes to match its spelling; this is called aspelling 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.[2]
Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo aspelling 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 whenTurkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to theLatin-basedTurkish alphabet.
Methods for phonetic transcription such as theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) aim to describe pronunciation in a standard form. They are often used to solve ambiguities in the spelling of written language. They may also be used to write languages with no previous written form. Systems like IPA can be used for phonemic representation or for showing more detailed phonetic information (seeNarrow vs. broad transcription).
Phonemic orthographies are different from phonetic transcription; whereas in a phonemic orthography,allophones will usually be represented by the same grapheme, a purely phonetic script would demand that phonetically distinct allophones be distinguished. To take an example from American English: the phoneme/t/ in the words "table" and "cat" would, in both a phonemic orthography and in IPA phonemic transcription, be written with the same character, while phonetic transcription would make a distinction between theaspirated "t" in "table", theflap in "butter", theunaspirated "t" in "stop" and theglottalized "t" in "cat" (not all these allophones exist in all Englishdialects). In other words, the sound that most English speakers think of as/t/ is really a group of sounds, all pronounced slightly differently depending on where they occur in a word. A perfectly phonemic orthography has one letter per group of sounds (phoneme), with different letters only where the sounds distinguish words (so "bed" is spelled differently from "bet").
A phonetic transcription representsphones, the sounds humans are capable of producing, many of which will often be grouped together as a single phoneme in any given natural language, though the groupings vary across languages. English, for example, does not distinguish phonemically between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but other languages, likeKorean,Bengali andHindi do.
The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is theInternational Phonetic Alphabet.
