Phonemic Orthography - Ideal Phonemic Orthography

Ideal Phonemic Orthography

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. This would mean that the spelling of a word would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation; and conversely that a speaker knowing the pronunciation of a word would be able to infer its spelling without any doubt. This ideal situation is rarely if ever achieved in practice – it seems that nearly all alphabetic orthographies deviate from it to some degree or other.

Note that there are effectively two different types of deviation from this phonemic ideal. In the first case, the exact one-to-one correspondence may be lost (for example, some phoneme may be represented by a digraph instead of a single letter), but the "regularity" is retained, in that there is still an algorithm (though 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 according to different rules than others, and prediction is no longer possible without knowledge about the orthography of individual words. Common cases of both of these types of deviation from the ideal are discussed in the following section.