Phonemic Orthography - Realignment of Orthography

Realignment of Orthography

With time, pronunciations change and spellings become out of date, as has happened to English and French. In order to maintain a phonemic orthography such a system would need periodic updating, as has been attempted by various language regulators and proposed by other spelling reformers.

Sometimes the pronunciation of a word changes to match its spelling; this is called a spelling 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 the pronunciation is so distant that associations among phonemes and graphemes cannot be readily identified. Examples are the towns of Leicester /lɛstər/ and Edinburgh /ˈɛdɪnbʌrə/. 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. The sounds which literate people perceive being heard in a word are largely influenced by the actual spelling of the word.

Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling 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 when Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Turkish alphabet of Latin origin.