Phonemic Orthography - Comparison Between Languages

Comparison Between Languages

Orthographies with a high grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include those of Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Turkish (apart from ğ and various palatal and vowel allophones), Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian), Bulgarian, Macedonian (if the apostrophe is counted, though slight inconsistencies may be found), Eastern Armenian (apart from o, v), Basque (apart from palatalized l, n), Haitian Creole, Castilian Spanish (apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z), Czech (apart from ě, ů, y, ý), Polish (apart from ó, h, rz), Romanian (apart from distinguishing semivowels from vowels), Ukrainian (mainly phonemic with some other historical/morphological rules, as well as palatalization), Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties and are sparsely used anyways), Mongolian (apart from letters representing multiple sounds depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate /ŋ/ from /n/ and voiced versus voiceless consonants) Azerbaijani (apart from k), and Kazakh (apart from и, у, х, щ, ю).

Many languages of India written in Brahmic scripts, such as Hindi (apart from schwa and nasal vowels) and Marathi,, but not Bengali and Gujarati, have phonemic orthographies.

Languages with highly phonemic orthographies often lack a word corresponding to the verb "to spell", or rarely use such a term, because the act of spelling out words is rarely needed (careful pronunciation of a word is generally sufficient to convey its spelling).

Some phonemic orthographies are slightly defective: Malay, Italian, Lithuanian, and Welsh do not fully distinguish their vowels, Serbian and Croatian do not distinguish tone and vowel length, Somali does not distinguish vowel phonation, etc.

French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.

Orthographies such as those of German, Hungarian (mainly phonemic with "ly, j" representing the same sound, but consonant and vowel length are not always accurate and various spellings reflect etymology, not pronunciation), Portuguese, and that of the modern Greek language (written with the Greek alphabet), as well as Korean hangul, are sometimes considered to be of intermediate depth (for example they include many morphophonemic features, as described above).

English orthography is highly non-phonemic. It would in any case be hard to construct an orthography that reflected all of the main dialects of English, because of differences in phonological systems (such as between standard British and American English, and between these and Australian English with its bad–lad split). The irregularity of English spelling is partly because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. However even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.

Most constructed languages such as Esperanto and Lojban have mostly phonemic orthographies.

The syllabary systems of Japanese (hiragana and katakana) are examples of almost perfectly shallow orthography – exceptions include the use ぢ and づ (discussed above) and the use of は, を, and へ to represent the sounds わ, お, and え, as relics of historical kana usage.