Written Language & Literacy - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2004

Philologists, linguists, and educators have insisted for several centuries that the ideal orthography has a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme. Others, however, have suggested deviations for such functions as distinguishing homophones, displaying popular alternative spellings, and retaining morpheme identity. If, indeed, the one-to-one ideal were accepted, the International Phonetic Alphabet should become the orthographic standard for all enlightened nations, yet the failure of even a single country to adopt it for practical writing suggests that other factors besides phonology are considered important for a writing system. Whatever the ideal orthography might be, the practical writing systems adopted upon this earth reflect linguistic, psychological, and cultural considerations. Knowingly or unknowingly, countries have adopted orthographies that favour either the early stages of learning to read or the advanced stages, that is, the experienced reader. The more a system tends towards a one-to-one relationship between graphemes and phonemes, the more it assists the new reader and the non-speaker of the language while the more it marks etymology and morphology, the more it favours the experienced reader. The study of psychological processing in reading demonstrates that human capacities for processing print are so powerful that complex patterns and irregularities pose only a small challenge. Orthographic regularity is extracted from lexical input and used to recognise words during reading. To understand how such a system develops, researchers should draw on the general mechanisms of perceptual learning.

Alphabetic orthographies show more or less ambiguous relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling and vice versa. Opaque orthographies, like English, often display unpredictable spelling–sound correspondences. In this paper we present a computational analysis of word-initial bi-directional spelling–sound correspondences for Dutch, English, French, German, and Hungarian, stated in entropy values for various grain sizes. This allows us to position the five languages on the continuum from opaque to transparent orthographies, both in spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling directions. The analysis is based on metrics derived from information theory, and therefore independent of any specific theory of visual word recognition as well as of any specific theoretical approach of orthography.

The paper provides a new analysis of the apostrophe in various languages which is less redundant and complies better with linguistic intuition than traditional definitions. The apostrophe does not mark the omission of letters, as traditionally assumed (English it’s, German auf’m ‘on the’, French l’ami ‘the friend’), but indicates important morpheme boundaries wherever this is necessary for certain reasons. Such an indication of a morpheme boundary can be necessitated by several factors, e.g. the omission of letters (English it’s, German auf’m, French l’ami), proper names (Turkish Ankara’da ‘in Ankara’, English John’s), or graphical code-switching (English two l’s, Russian laptop’ов ‘laptop, gen. pl.’). This explanation covers even most violations of current orthographic norms, e.g. German Häus’chen ‘small house’, and it has no exceptions whatsoever in formal texts. (English isn’t, German ’nauf ‘up’, French p’tit ‘small’ are mere ‘transcripts’ of colloquial speech.)

Assuming that a writing system is inevitably dependent on a language system, the main function of written representations is to give access to the basic representations of the language system. In this paper, I want to deal with graphematic phenomena, i.e. the relations of written representations to corresponding phonological representations. In particular, I will delve into the relation of written representations to the phonological factor of the number of syllables, based on data from English and German. Though in these languages, there is neither a specific written element relating to the syllable number nor an isomorphic relation between vowel letters and the number of syllables, two questions are worth examining: Can a word have more syllables than vowel letters? Can a word have less syllables than uninterrupted sequences of vowel letters? The first question will be answered positively for both languages although there are some severe differences to be stated; the second question will be answered positively only for English. I will show that these results are side-effects of more basic regularities of the writing systems under consideration.

The present article shows that the letters of the Modern Roman Alphabet have an internal structure that is highly systematic in both inner-graphematic and functional-phonological terms. The framework of analysis is Optimality Theory. This approach is congenial for the data at issue as many apparently unmotivated exceptions are optimal choices among competing candidates that are evaluated by violable ranked constraints. The results of the present investigation corroborate a branching correspondence model in which general modality-independent constraints such as dependency, compositionality, markedness and iconism are shown to have independent modality-specific instantiations in speech and writing with bidirectional correspondences serving as functional links across modalities.

Our everyday experience shows that we have problems in recognizing objects which only differ in their symmetry properties (street signs with two arrows in different directions or mathematical signs such as 〈 and 〉). Perception is closely correlated with an inner comparison: the perceived object with its surrounding, the perceived object with former experience and so on. The brain has evolved different constancy abilities (e.g. colour constancy) and one of them is object constancy. This object constancy makes it possible to perceive an object regardless of its orientation in space. Symmetric letter pairs with different sound representations (such as 〈b〉 and 〈d〉) are, due to object constancy, typically identified as one object. This deficiency of distinctiveness should affect their readability. The above hypothesis was examined in many scripts. The result was that mature scripts (which usually developed for a long time) avoid these symmetric letter pairs (called extrinsic symmetry) by adding distinctive features such as serifs or different stroke thickness. On the other hand, if a writer is allowed to invent letter shapes freely, he makes use of extrinsic symmetrical letter pairs. This is supposed to have aesthetic reasons — letters are often perceived as a standing object or even as a “body” on a plane. It is therefore possible to statistically separate mature scripts which show up no extrinsic symmetry from invented scripts full of extrinsic symmetry. The runes are a writing system which does not quite fit in this widely proved distinction. They have developed from the Latin writing system (or a close relative of it) and have therefore inherited the avoidance of extrinsic symmetry. The reduction of the character set from 24 signs in the Old Futhark to 16 characters in the Younger Futhark is accompanied by a simplification of runic signs. During this period the runes develop a high degree of extrinsic symmetry. Moreover, the letter shapes are often related to different sound representations. These irregularities in usage may be caused by interference from the Latin writing system. The resulting lesser readability could have been one reason for the decline of the runes. This paper shows in many figures and graphs how symmetry emerges and under what circumstances it is used to create new letter shapes.

The basic goal of this paper is to provide a formal treatment of “orthographic principles” in terms of optimization. Starting from a discussion of a preference-oriented vs. a rule-oriented systematic theory of orthography, the paper explores an explicit description of orthographic regularities in terms of Optimality Theory, that is, in terms of a theory of constraints and their interaction. The empirical focus of this paper is on German orthography, in particular on sound–letter correspondences, on morphological constancy in the light of phonological alternations, and on the (non-)doubling of graphemes. Interactions of various constraints to specify the relationship between regular and irregular spellings involving these domains on the one hand and phonological forms on the other hand are presented.