Questions tagged [orthography]
Orthography is a set of rules that determine the correct way of writing in a certain language, including norms about spelling, punctuation and word breaks. Orthography is usually not considered part of natural language or grammar itself and therefore not strictly a subject of linguistics, but sometimes of interest in investigating individual languages' pronunciation and writing systems.
294 questions
10 votes
4 answers
3k views
How do dictionaries determine correct spelling?
I've heard that most modern dictionaries are descriptive. If so, why do they not give 'accomodate' as a valid word? Or why do they not say that 'your' means 'you are'? It's easy to find real examples ...
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1 vote
0 answers
145 views
Orthography: Change in popularity of "okay" vs "OK"
The "okay" spelling has in recent decades become the most common one, by a significant margin (according to Google Ngrams): I realize that linguistic change is continuous and unpredictable, ...
- 459
0 votes
1 answer
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Does the lowercasing or uppercasing of a text in English change its translation in other languages?
For example, if I have the text "This rear camera is awesome" , and have translations of this text to other languages… Can I say that translation for "This Rear Camera is awesome"...
1 vote
2 answers
214 views
Phonemic transcriptions and etymology
In certain languages such as German or Russian word-final consonants regularly lose their voicing, but remain voiced in other positions, e.g. in German "Pferd" (horse) with [t] while "...
user50587
-3 votes
1 answer
86 views
How should/do dictionaries display and relate orthographic and pronunciation variants of an underlying concept?
In English we have "color" and "colour", which is the same underlying concept, but just different spellings. So it would be wrong (IMO) for a database-driven electronic dictionary ...
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4 votes
1 answer
277 views
How exactly did the Thai script tone marking system evolve?
The Wikipedia page "Thai script" gives a helpful summary table of tones to tone diacritics that looks completely absurd at first glance; I've been trying to figure it out but haven't found ...
- 179
0 votes
1 answer
55 views
Romance dialects : sound-to-spelling correspondance?
Romance languages differ greatly in between dialects. What are exemples of Romance languages that have the same writing system, but are written phonetically, with differences between dialects?
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0 votes
1 answer
188 views
Why is the spelling of an English word only a rough guide to its pronunciation?
As a non-native speaker of English (and a native speaker of an Abugida language that is mostly written as it is pronounced), I always wondered how English (and similar languages) developed the ...
- 103
2 votes
1 answer
194 views
Does conservative orthography promote "phonetic denial"?
Are there speech-communities that assert that the gemination (still) present in their orthography (still) exists in their pronunciation, but audio analysis does not support this assertion? I guess ...
- 135
0 votes
0 answers
33 views
Is plain orthographic transciption of speech recordings adequate for corpus creation?
NOTE: I am not a linguist, but my interest is in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. I am doing a research which is focused only on gathering new or distinct words on a recently described ...
- 101
2 votes
1 answer
84 views
Were يانيه and یانیه interchangeable in Ottoman Turkish?
Copy/pasting from this official pdf from the Turkish government produces يانيه. Czech Wiki uses the same spelling. English Wikipedia and Wiktionary, however, both use the spelling یانیه. Those look ...
- 160
5 votes
1 answer
753 views
How unpredictable must vowels be for a writing system to classify as an abjad?
I've been pondering a conlang with a rather unusual orthography. I'm only stating this because no natural language has this sort of writing system. Essentially, its a system that only writes ...
user43283
1 vote
1 answer
179 views
Why is anekdota written with a "k" in Czech but a "g" in Polish (anegdota)?
So I decided to compare the languages Czech and Polish. The devolving of voiced consonants to voiceless consonants are pretty much the same. However, one of the differences were, words with [g] ...
- 318
4 votes
1 answer
253 views
Orthography changes in Italian
How has the orthography of Italian changed in the 19th century? I’m trying to find an in-depth guide but I haven’t found any resources. Maybe it just hasn’t changed except for a few technical words?
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-2 votes
1 answer
306 views
Why is the day of the week capitalized only in Germanic languages and not in Romance languages?
In English, it is written as Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday and January February March April May June July August September November December. On the other hand, in Romance ...
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