Phonemic Orthography - Deviations From Phonemic Orthography

Deviations From Phonemic Orthography

Some ways in which orthographies may deviate from the ideal of one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence are listed below. The first list contains deviations that tend only to make the relation between spelling and pronunciation more complex, without affecting its predictability (see above paragraph).

• A phoneme may be represented by a sequence of letters – called a multigraph – rather than by a single letter (as in the case of the digraph ch in English and French, and the trigraph sch in German). (This only retains predictability if the multigraph cannot be broken down into smaller units, for example some languages require diacritics to distinguish between "sch" and "s" + "ch"; cf e.g. fathead in English.) This is often due to the use of an alphabet that was originally used for a different language (the Latin alphabet in these examples) and thus does not have single letters available for all phonemes in the language currently being written (although some orthographies use devices such as diacritics to increase the number of available letters).
• Sometimes, conversely, a single letter may represent a sequence of more than one phoneme (as я can represent the sequence /ja/ in Russian and other languages).
• Sometimes the rules of correspondence are more complex and depend on adjacent letters, often as a result of historical sound changes (as with the rules for the pronunciation of c and ci in Italian, and the silent e in English).

An orthography mainly affected only by the above types of deviation, with only minor instances of other types of deviation, may still be described as phonemic, or regular, since pronunciation and spelling still correspond in a predictable way. However the deviations listed below are more "serious", as they reduce this predictability (in at least one direction), thus introducing irregularity.

• Sometimes different letters correspond to the same phoneme (as u and ó in Polish are both pronounced as the phoneme /u/). This is often for historical reasons (these Polish letters originally stood for different phonemes, which merged later). This affects the predictability of spelling from pronunciation, though not necessarily vice versa. Another example is found in modern Greek, where the phoneme /i/ can be written in six different ways: ι, η, υ, ει, οι and υι.
• Conversely, a letter or group of letters can correspond to different phonemes in different contexts (as th does in English; originally this stood for a single phoneme, which then split).
• Spelling may otherwise represent a historical pronunciation; orthography does not necessarily keep up with sound changes in the spoken language.
• Spelling may represent the pronunciation of a different dialect from the one being considered. Orthographies tend to reflect a standard variety of the language; however for an international language with wide variations in its dialects, such as English, it would be impossible to represent even the major varieties of the language with a single phonemic orthography.
• Spellings of loanwords often adhere to, or are influenced by, the orthography of the source language (as with the English words ballet and fajita, from French and Spanish respectively, and with the Thai word เบียร์ "beer", which includes a letter for the final consonant "r" which appears in the English word it was borrowed from, even though this letter is not pronounced). With some loanwords, though, regularity is retained – either by nativizing the pronunciation to match the spelling (as with the Russian word шофёр, from French chauffeur, but pronounced in accordance with the normal rules of Russian vowel reduction; see also spelling pronunciation), or by nativizing the spelling (for example, football is spelt fútbol in Spanish and futebol in Portuguese).
• Spelling may reflect false etymology (as in the English words hiccough, island, so spelt because of an imagined connection with the words cough and isle), or distant etymology (as in the English word debt, where the b was added under the influence of Latin).
• Spelling may reflect morphophonemic structure rather than the purely phonemic (see next section), although this is often also a reflection of historical pronunciation.

Most orthographies do not reflect the changes in pronunciation known as sandhi, where pronunciation is affected by adjacent sounds in neighboring words (however written Sanskrit and other Indian languages do reflect such changes). A language may also use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items, such as the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries (and the different treatment in English orthography of words derived from Latin and Greek).