Phonemic Orthography - Morphophonemic Features

Morphophonemic Features

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. This 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.

• The English plural morpheme is written -s regardless of whether it is pronounced as /s/ or /z/; it is cats and dogs, not dogz. This is because the and sounds are forms of the same underlying morphophoneme, automatically pronounced differently depending on its environment. (However when this morpheme takes the form /ɪz/, the addition of the vowel is reflected in the spelling: churches, masses.)
• Similarly the English past tense morpheme is written -ed regardless of whether it is pronounced as /d/, /t/ or /ɪd/.
• Many English words retain spellings that reflect their etymology and morphology rather than their present-day pronunciation. For example, sign and signature include the spelling , which means the same, but is pronounced differently, in the two words. Other examples are "science /saɪ/ vs. unconscious /ʃ/, prejudice /prɛ/ vs. prequel /priː/, nation /neɪ/ vs. nationalism /næ/, and special /spɛ/ vs. species /spiː/.
• Phonological assimilation is often not reflected in spelling, even in otherwise phonemic orthographies such as Spanish, where obtener "obtain" and optimista "optimist" are written with b and p respectively, even though both are pronounced /p/ by assimilation with the following /t/.
• The final-obstruent devoicing that occurs in many languages (such as German, Polish, Russian and Welsh) is not normally reflected in the spelling. For example, in German, Bad "bath" is spelt with a final d, even though it is pronounced /t/, thus corresponding to other morphologically related forms such as the verb baden, where the d is pronounced /d/. (Compare Rat, raten, where the t is pronounced /t/ in both positions.) Turkish orthography, however, is more strictly phonemic: for example, the imperative of eder "does" is spelled et, as it is pronounced (and the same as the word for "meat"), not *ed as it would be if the German approach were followed.

Korean hangul has changed over the centuries from a highly phonemic to a largely morpho-phonemic orthography, and there are moves in Turkey to make that script more morphophonemic as well. 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 – see rendaku.