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Georgian language claims that there are 14 true alphabets. Anyone know what they are?
How can International Phonetic Alphabet be used as an example of a phonemic alphabet? Don't you see the phonemic x phonetic conflict mentioned later in the article?
The article seems to talk equally much on both topics (phonemic and phonetic orthographies). Perhaps rename (and restructure) it to cover both notions?-- Imz 06:41, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
How can Interlingua be considered phonemic when the sound [f] can be spelled "f" or "ph", the sound [r] "r" or "rh", the sound [t] "t" or "th", the "c" can be read [k] or [ts], the "ch" can be read [k] or [ʃ], the [k] can be spelled "c", "q" or "ch", the "g" can be read [g] or [ʒ], the "j" can be read [ʒ] or [j], the [ts] can be spelled "c" or "t", the "w" can be read [w] or [v]?
For an example of the difficulty in creating a phonemic alphabet for English, the cot/caught merger is probably a better example. Bad/lad split seems to affect less than 10 words, but the caught/cot merger affects a huge chunk of the English language, and is also a lot more recognizable to language enthusiasts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.212.27.154 ( talk) 00:53, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
I don't feel confident enough to edit the article directly without discussion, but as a native Spanish speaker (from Spain, not Latin-America) I'm under the impression that Spanish has more than a good "grapheme-to-phoneme" correspondence, and yet it's not included in the list, which is pretty stricking to me, mostly considering other more minoritary languages, such as Basque (euskara), Finnish, Sanskrit, or even constructed languages that very little people speak at all.
I didn't edit the article myself because I can't prove Spanish would be comparable to them in "grapheme-to-phoneme" terms with more than my own experience as a native speaker, but I would like someone to tell me about this and justify, if possible, why it is not included as I believe it should be.
This example is completely wrong, the word is pronounced [ʃi] in Italian, and for this reason it has seen its spelling changed from ski ("k" isn't used in Italian anyway) to sci ("sc" is how we usually spell the sound [ʃ]). Lupo Azzurro ( talk) 16:21, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi there. I'm the one who added the original ski example, so sorry about the mistake. However, I don't like the subsequent changes. The paragraph was meant to answer the question "How does a language with a (more-or-less) phonemic orthography handle loanwords", by giving examples for each of three options:
Therefore:
Ideally we should have 3 different languages, each with a phonemic orthography, where one language tends to use strategy #1 for loanwords, one uses #2, and one #3; and then quote examples for each. If we must use English, it could be the source for the loanwords. Of course, nothing is as clearcut as this ideal, but English is so far from it that the paragraph has nothing to do with phonemic orthography and belongs instead in the loanword article. jnestorius( talk) 10:50, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
It says grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence, which is the usual when talking about the very correspondence. However, it is trully a grapheme-to-(allophone or phoneme) correspondence, isn't it? Take this example (which is from the allophone page): cat v table - those t's are different phonemes, but the same allophone. Because the everyday description is going to be this more common name grapheme-to-phoneme, I think we should keep it; but we should also link out to a separate page that defines it, or if not then at least handle the ambiguity here where it occurs. — robbiemuffin page talk 13:28, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
Hi,
Since there's been a bit of a revert war over using Korean as an example, I thought I'd throw my two bits in. Hangul is morphophonemic, not phonemic. That is, while it restricts itself to phonemic distinctions, it does not simply transcribe words according to their pronunciation, but according to their morphology. We have a bit of this in English with -s. This is pronounced either /s/, as in cats and walks, or /z/, as in dogs and goes, but in all cases it given the same spelling, conflating those two phonemes. German and Russian do the same kind of thing with final stops. For example, German Bad is pronounced /bat/; the /d/ only shows up with a following vowel, as in Baden /baden/. Turkish, on the other hand, is purely phonemic: 'to do' is spelled etmek, as it is pronounced, even though morphologically that first consonant is a dee, as can be seen in ederim 'I do'. (This is just off the top of my head. If the examples are wrong, the principle is still sound.) Hangul is like German here rather than Turkish. It used to be phonemic, but that was changed when the modern orthography was established in the 19th-20th centuries. See Hangul#Orthography. kwami ( talk) 01:04, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
The present list of languages with "a good grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence", is a little arbitrary. I understand it just wants to give some examples, but I feel it would be nice/interesting/useful to make it more systematic. That is, I would like to make a list of languages with excellent, good, fair (etc) levels of regularity in the spelling system. Unfortunately I'm also afraid this could arise endless flame wars over which language is "best"... I'd give it a try, anyway.
It would be nice to get some sources for this list. According to my feeling Dutch (my native) would fit here as well, but i have not found any source for it (i have not found any for the already listed languages either) Nicob1984 ( talk) 16:51, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Should Japanese be considered to have phonemic orthography? The Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries have a virtually 100% grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence. This of course is completely turned on its head when throwing in Kanji... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sneeka2 ( talk • contribs) 11:58, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
I am a native Greek speaker and I think that modern Greek is phonemic orthography. I can't prove this against other languages, so I don't bother editing the article, but I really believe that Greek is an almost perfect example of phonemic orthography, in the sense that you can easily write the words only by hearing the language, and vise versa, just knowing the list of graphemes that correspond to phonemes. When you write the words from the sounds, you will make orthographic mistakes (because vowel phonemes have multiple orthographic realizations), but by reading the (orthographically wrong)words again, you get the same sounds. Only one minor exception I am aware of, and this is probably form degeneration of the language. I could be wrong, I am not a glossologist but I will be really surprised if modern Greek is really not phonemic orthography and why. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.69.157.214 ( talk) 11:28, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
I just expanded and rewrote this article by combining the information existing on this same topic from a number of different articles. Information has been taken from:
I now intend to revise those articles by writing the appropriate sections as summaries, with a link to this article as the full exposition. Victor Yus ( talk) 07:44, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
The movement represented at shwa.org has a phonemic orthography including gait. This modern system may stand up to the rigors that defeat traditional orthographies in phonemic representation. Opinions on this example would be appreciated. Rgdboer ( talk) 03:53, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
Peter Cyrus is the moving force behind the Shwascript. He has participated in a long-running discussion on Yahoo user-group "conlang". There are about 331 messages concerning the script or its suitability as a topic for the group. To read them go to conlang and search "shwa". Rgdboer ( talk) 21:27, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
Another modern phonemic orthography is teascript by Herman Miller. He says it is based on Tengwar of J.R.R Tolkien. In this case there is a movement; however, linguist comment on the phonemics is wanted. Rgdboer ( talk) 21:28, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
In this page, it's said that language that have phomenic orthography doesn't have separate word for "to spell". But in Malay, at least Indonesian, have a word "mengeja" with same meaning. Malay alphabet is nearly phomenic, with exception the word that is from loanword, like "bank", and also have no separate word for e schwa and front e. — Christian Irwan ( talk) 04:13, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
In the morphophonemic features section, it states that the English past tense morpheme is written -ed regardless of whether it is pronounced as /d/, /t/ or /ɪd/. I don't believe this to be strictly true, as in British English the words spelt, spilt, smelt, learnt etc are perfectly valid spellings. Also, AFAIK the past tense forms of feel, lean and sweep are always felt, lent and swept. Granted, there are some words "spelt"-ed regardless of regional variation, such as kicked, tossed (although I believe these two both had now obsolete -t forms: kickt and tost) and brushed, the statement still seems to be inaccurate. Thoughts? Alphathon / 'æɫ.fə.θɒn/ ( talk) 22:11, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
"In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence."
I beleave the article misses the fact that Serbian language using the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet developed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić is the only one which has this perfect "one-to-one correspondence". The Serbian Cyrillic alphaber was adopted by late 19 century and was created by Karadzic on the principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written". The alphabet consists of 30 letters each one corresponding to a different sound, and allways that sound, regardless of the letter combinations. Also, it has no diacritics neither hard/soft signs as other Cyrillic alphabets do. Practically most people in former Yugoslavia know this uniqueness of the Serbian language and alphabet, possibly no one came here to add that information simply because they missed this article. FkpCascais ( talk) 20:07, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
From kilburn101: I agree with the above comment. Serbian Cyrillic does have a perfect isomorphism between phoneme and letter. I speak and read a little Serbian and, so, am rather familiar with the spelling system and its (short) history. There are other alphabetic orthographies that are said to be as perfect (or nearly so): Finnish and Turkish. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kilburn101 ( talk • contribs) 20:04, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
some words are spelled differently
and here are some examples;
basin- bäsín
anamorph-
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:cf6f:9560:80dc:a9f0:1d42:eda0 ( talk • contribs) 16:37, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
"A disputed example of an ideally phonemic orthography is Serbo-Croatian language. In its alphabet (Latin as well as Serbian Cyrillic alphabet), there are 30 graphemes, each uniquely corresponding to one of the phonemes. This seemingly perfect yet simple phonemic orthography was achieved in the 19th century,"
Disputed by whom? And why seemingly perfect? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.242.114.196 ( talk • contribs) 09:01, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
How would English be classified in terms of "phonemic orthography"? Is English spelling be regarded by linguists as mostly phonemic, somewhat phonemic, or barely phonemic? And phonetic spelling redirects to this page. Do we want to clarify the difference here between "phonemic" and "phonetic" for nonexpert readers? Wolfdog ( talk) 15:37, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
Hang on, why is Breton on the list? It doesn't even have a standardized form and its pronounciation varies 76.157.162.44 ( talk) 04:26, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
This
level-5 vital article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Georgian language claims that there are 14 true alphabets. Anyone know what they are?
How can International Phonetic Alphabet be used as an example of a phonemic alphabet? Don't you see the phonemic x phonetic conflict mentioned later in the article?
The article seems to talk equally much on both topics (phonemic and phonetic orthographies). Perhaps rename (and restructure) it to cover both notions?-- Imz 06:41, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
How can Interlingua be considered phonemic when the sound [f] can be spelled "f" or "ph", the sound [r] "r" or "rh", the sound [t] "t" or "th", the "c" can be read [k] or [ts], the "ch" can be read [k] or [ʃ], the [k] can be spelled "c", "q" or "ch", the "g" can be read [g] or [ʒ], the "j" can be read [ʒ] or [j], the [ts] can be spelled "c" or "t", the "w" can be read [w] or [v]?
For an example of the difficulty in creating a phonemic alphabet for English, the cot/caught merger is probably a better example. Bad/lad split seems to affect less than 10 words, but the caught/cot merger affects a huge chunk of the English language, and is also a lot more recognizable to language enthusiasts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.212.27.154 ( talk) 00:53, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
I don't feel confident enough to edit the article directly without discussion, but as a native Spanish speaker (from Spain, not Latin-America) I'm under the impression that Spanish has more than a good "grapheme-to-phoneme" correspondence, and yet it's not included in the list, which is pretty stricking to me, mostly considering other more minoritary languages, such as Basque (euskara), Finnish, Sanskrit, or even constructed languages that very little people speak at all.
I didn't edit the article myself because I can't prove Spanish would be comparable to them in "grapheme-to-phoneme" terms with more than my own experience as a native speaker, but I would like someone to tell me about this and justify, if possible, why it is not included as I believe it should be.
This example is completely wrong, the word is pronounced [ʃi] in Italian, and for this reason it has seen its spelling changed from ski ("k" isn't used in Italian anyway) to sci ("sc" is how we usually spell the sound [ʃ]). Lupo Azzurro ( talk) 16:21, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi there. I'm the one who added the original ski example, so sorry about the mistake. However, I don't like the subsequent changes. The paragraph was meant to answer the question "How does a language with a (more-or-less) phonemic orthography handle loanwords", by giving examples for each of three options:
Therefore:
Ideally we should have 3 different languages, each with a phonemic orthography, where one language tends to use strategy #1 for loanwords, one uses #2, and one #3; and then quote examples for each. If we must use English, it could be the source for the loanwords. Of course, nothing is as clearcut as this ideal, but English is so far from it that the paragraph has nothing to do with phonemic orthography and belongs instead in the loanword article. jnestorius( talk) 10:50, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
It says grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence, which is the usual when talking about the very correspondence. However, it is trully a grapheme-to-(allophone or phoneme) correspondence, isn't it? Take this example (which is from the allophone page): cat v table - those t's are different phonemes, but the same allophone. Because the everyday description is going to be this more common name grapheme-to-phoneme, I think we should keep it; but we should also link out to a separate page that defines it, or if not then at least handle the ambiguity here where it occurs. — robbiemuffin page talk 13:28, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
Hi,
Since there's been a bit of a revert war over using Korean as an example, I thought I'd throw my two bits in. Hangul is morphophonemic, not phonemic. That is, while it restricts itself to phonemic distinctions, it does not simply transcribe words according to their pronunciation, but according to their morphology. We have a bit of this in English with -s. This is pronounced either /s/, as in cats and walks, or /z/, as in dogs and goes, but in all cases it given the same spelling, conflating those two phonemes. German and Russian do the same kind of thing with final stops. For example, German Bad is pronounced /bat/; the /d/ only shows up with a following vowel, as in Baden /baden/. Turkish, on the other hand, is purely phonemic: 'to do' is spelled etmek, as it is pronounced, even though morphologically that first consonant is a dee, as can be seen in ederim 'I do'. (This is just off the top of my head. If the examples are wrong, the principle is still sound.) Hangul is like German here rather than Turkish. It used to be phonemic, but that was changed when the modern orthography was established in the 19th-20th centuries. See Hangul#Orthography. kwami ( talk) 01:04, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
The present list of languages with "a good grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence", is a little arbitrary. I understand it just wants to give some examples, but I feel it would be nice/interesting/useful to make it more systematic. That is, I would like to make a list of languages with excellent, good, fair (etc) levels of regularity in the spelling system. Unfortunately I'm also afraid this could arise endless flame wars over which language is "best"... I'd give it a try, anyway.
It would be nice to get some sources for this list. According to my feeling Dutch (my native) would fit here as well, but i have not found any source for it (i have not found any for the already listed languages either) Nicob1984 ( talk) 16:51, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Should Japanese be considered to have phonemic orthography? The Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries have a virtually 100% grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence. This of course is completely turned on its head when throwing in Kanji... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sneeka2 ( talk • contribs) 11:58, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
I am a native Greek speaker and I think that modern Greek is phonemic orthography. I can't prove this against other languages, so I don't bother editing the article, but I really believe that Greek is an almost perfect example of phonemic orthography, in the sense that you can easily write the words only by hearing the language, and vise versa, just knowing the list of graphemes that correspond to phonemes. When you write the words from the sounds, you will make orthographic mistakes (because vowel phonemes have multiple orthographic realizations), but by reading the (orthographically wrong)words again, you get the same sounds. Only one minor exception I am aware of, and this is probably form degeneration of the language. I could be wrong, I am not a glossologist but I will be really surprised if modern Greek is really not phonemic orthography and why. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.69.157.214 ( talk) 11:28, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
I just expanded and rewrote this article by combining the information existing on this same topic from a number of different articles. Information has been taken from:
I now intend to revise those articles by writing the appropriate sections as summaries, with a link to this article as the full exposition. Victor Yus ( talk) 07:44, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
The movement represented at shwa.org has a phonemic orthography including gait. This modern system may stand up to the rigors that defeat traditional orthographies in phonemic representation. Opinions on this example would be appreciated. Rgdboer ( talk) 03:53, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
Peter Cyrus is the moving force behind the Shwascript. He has participated in a long-running discussion on Yahoo user-group "conlang". There are about 331 messages concerning the script or its suitability as a topic for the group. To read them go to conlang and search "shwa". Rgdboer ( talk) 21:27, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
Another modern phonemic orthography is teascript by Herman Miller. He says it is based on Tengwar of J.R.R Tolkien. In this case there is a movement; however, linguist comment on the phonemics is wanted. Rgdboer ( talk) 21:28, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
In this page, it's said that language that have phomenic orthography doesn't have separate word for "to spell". But in Malay, at least Indonesian, have a word "mengeja" with same meaning. Malay alphabet is nearly phomenic, with exception the word that is from loanword, like "bank", and also have no separate word for e schwa and front e. — Christian Irwan ( talk) 04:13, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
In the morphophonemic features section, it states that the English past tense morpheme is written -ed regardless of whether it is pronounced as /d/, /t/ or /ɪd/. I don't believe this to be strictly true, as in British English the words spelt, spilt, smelt, learnt etc are perfectly valid spellings. Also, AFAIK the past tense forms of feel, lean and sweep are always felt, lent and swept. Granted, there are some words "spelt"-ed regardless of regional variation, such as kicked, tossed (although I believe these two both had now obsolete -t forms: kickt and tost) and brushed, the statement still seems to be inaccurate. Thoughts? Alphathon / 'æɫ.fə.θɒn/ ( talk) 22:11, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
"In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence."
I beleave the article misses the fact that Serbian language using the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet developed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić is the only one which has this perfect "one-to-one correspondence". The Serbian Cyrillic alphaber was adopted by late 19 century and was created by Karadzic on the principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written". The alphabet consists of 30 letters each one corresponding to a different sound, and allways that sound, regardless of the letter combinations. Also, it has no diacritics neither hard/soft signs as other Cyrillic alphabets do. Practically most people in former Yugoslavia know this uniqueness of the Serbian language and alphabet, possibly no one came here to add that information simply because they missed this article. FkpCascais ( talk) 20:07, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
From kilburn101: I agree with the above comment. Serbian Cyrillic does have a perfect isomorphism between phoneme and letter. I speak and read a little Serbian and, so, am rather familiar with the spelling system and its (short) history. There are other alphabetic orthographies that are said to be as perfect (or nearly so): Finnish and Turkish. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kilburn101 ( talk • contribs) 20:04, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
some words are spelled differently
and here are some examples;
basin- bäsín
anamorph-
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:cf6f:9560:80dc:a9f0:1d42:eda0 ( talk • contribs) 16:37, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
"A disputed example of an ideally phonemic orthography is Serbo-Croatian language. In its alphabet (Latin as well as Serbian Cyrillic alphabet), there are 30 graphemes, each uniquely corresponding to one of the phonemes. This seemingly perfect yet simple phonemic orthography was achieved in the 19th century,"
Disputed by whom? And why seemingly perfect? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.242.114.196 ( talk • contribs) 09:01, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
How would English be classified in terms of "phonemic orthography"? Is English spelling be regarded by linguists as mostly phonemic, somewhat phonemic, or barely phonemic? And phonetic spelling redirects to this page. Do we want to clarify the difference here between "phonemic" and "phonetic" for nonexpert readers? Wolfdog ( talk) 15:37, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
Hang on, why is Breton on the list? It doesn't even have a standardized form and its pronounciation varies 76.157.162.44 ( talk) 04:26, 19 February 2024 (UTC)