A European Informational Website
learn more
The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of writing in that language. Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós ("correct") and γράφειν gráphein ("to write"). Orthography is distinct from typography.
While "orthography" colloquially is often used synonymously with spelling, spelling is only part of orthography: Orthography defines the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these symbols, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.
Orthography includes the writing system of a language. English, for example, has an alphabet of 26 letters that represent consonants and vowels, but with no glyph for stress. However, each English letter may represent more than one sound, and many English sounds (phonemes) may be written with more than one letter. In addition, combinations of letters called digraphs, such as th, represent single sounds in English orthography. Other languages which use the same alphabet as English may not use the same digraphs.
An example of an orthographic rule describing how letters are used in English is i before e except after c; another is that the plural is written with the letter s regardless of whether it is pronounced as an [s], as in cats, or as a [z], as in dogs.
Orthography encompasses many rules and topics, such as:
An orthography may be described as 'efficient' if it has one glyph per speech sound (phoneme) and vice versa, but few systems are perfect. An orthography may also have varying degrees of efficiency for reading or writing. For example, diverse letter, digraph, and diacritic shapes contribute to diverse word shapes, which aid fluent reading, while heavy use of apostrophes or diacritics makes writing slow, and the use of symbols not found on standard keyboards makes computer or cell phone input awkward. These are all considerations in the design of a script.
An orthography that does not represent all the sounds of a language, such as those of Italian, English or Arabic, are called 'defective'. Both inefficient and defective orthographies may motivate spelling reform.
An example of one of the most complex orthographies is Japanese, which uses a combination of several thousand logographic glyphs called kanji[1], two syllabaries called katakana and hiragana, and the Latin alphabet, rōmaji. All words in Japanese can be written in either katakana, hiragana, or rōmaji, and most also have a kanji form. The choice of which type of writing to use depends on a number of factors, including standard conventions, readability, and stylistic choices.
(C)hiàⁿ-jī-hoat ()равапіс