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This page is part
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A. A few Quick Definitions Alphabet - typically defined as an ordered set of sound signs - named after 1st two letters in the Greek: alpha-beta [alef-bet] or the first two letters of the Phoenician-Caananite alphabet: 'alef-bet. A better definition would be a grapheme-phoneme correspondence table . This concept is found in the following definition by David Crystal: B. Stability of Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences - Word pronunciation changes over time. To retain a consistent alphabetic correspondences, some words must be rectified or respelled. The time interval often depends on contact with other speech communities. Spelling adjustments (minor reforms) are usually needed every 50 to 100 years. Restoring sound spelling simplifies teaching and facilitates learning but old habits are difficult to change.C. Vowel Shift Around 1400 there was a change in the pronunciation of the vowels in many words. This marks the boundary between Chaucer's middle english and Shakespeare's modern english.D. Modern English Period E. RP - Educated British English H.
General
Characteristics of Spanish
An alphabet is often defined as an ordered set of sound signs. The written symbols (or signs) represent sound categories (phonemes) that are recognized as critical by the speakers of a particular language. An alphabet is a correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. The alphabet is the look-up table or correspondence table, not the sequence of letters. To learn the alphabet is not learning to recite the sequence. Rather, it is learning the sound-to-symbol correspondences. In English, there are at least 40 of these phoneme-grapheme correspondences to be learned. Almost twice as many as the number of letters. An alphabetic writing system is one in which each letter represents one and only one sound. As soon as people start sing the writing system to represent a living language, things start to change. Because pronunciation of certain words and word groups will change over time, realignment is necessary to retain the alphabet. Marks or letters that do not consistently indicate a particular sound are not good sound-signs. Without a consistent set of correspondences, there is no alphabet. The original order of about 28 phonograms was probably a mnemonic. It could have referred to the 28 asterisms [ancient zodiac]. [Kelley and Moran] PHONEME phoneme
- a difference in sound that makes a difference in meaning - a range of
sounds treated as the same sound. A phoneme is abstract concept or
category - you cannot see, touch, or hear a phoneme but you can point to
instances. Phonemes are language specific. Where English speakers
distinguishes two phonemes [ lid/rid ], speakers of other
languages may hear only one. R is not distinct from L in Japanese.
Phonemes are called the smallest unit of meaningful sound in a language.
An orthography where the letters represent sounds is called phonemic. How
many phonemes are there in the word brought? Answer: 4 brot.
How many in the word thorough? To answer the question, look it up
in a pronunciation guide and count the phonograms: q'r'u
The count would be identical to the spelling thero.
The sound categories usually have many phones or sound segments as members. A phoneme is rarely a single sound although the F phoneme has a very restricted range of articulation and could be called a monophone. It is possible for human voice to make 1000's of sounds. Usually, only 30 to 40 achieve phonemic status in any language.
Hawaiian has 20 phonemes, Spanish has 30 phonemes, English has 40-50. The variance depends on the number of combinations that are listed as distinct sound categories. Jones and many other phoneticians stopped listing categories beyond diphthongs. For example , Ire [ai@] is not listed as a phoneme. There are languages with as many as 70 phonemes. To be recognized as a phoneme, the sound changes must change the meaning of at least one pair of words. Is there a phonemic difference between a: and o in American English? Both graphemes refer to the [ha] phoneme. o is a checked vowel always followed by a consonant making it short, a: is free and can occur at the end of a syllable. There can be sound categories recognized by everyone that are not phonemic. There is a difference between paat and pot, Taam and Tom, father and bother, and waant and wont but the difference between the long a and short o is not phonemic. Most Americans cannot even hear the difference. They pronounce father and bother the same. There is no word where changing the length of the [ah] sound changes its meaning. The difference is that we associate a with the sounds [ae, uh, ah] and we associate o with [ah, aw, oh]. In Spanglish: Taam=tomm. In RP, there is a distinction.
phoneme test - A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit of sound that distinguishes one word (meaning) from another. Thus, to be recognized as a phoneme, the sound change must signal a change in meaning in at least one word pair. Critical pairs include the following: bed bid. cat mat. wonder /wLnd'/ wander. possible/passable pos'bl/paes'bl To test whether or not a sound is a phoneme, find a word pair showing that substituting one small change in pronunciation another changes its interpretation. Is the schwa sound phonemic? Is stress phonemic? Is scwha a phoneme?
In English, over 40% of the vowel sounds are mid lax.
Linguists have referenced this with a new letter, a turned e, called a
schwa [ obscure
vowel - there are two: the terminal unstressed vowel in other
and the stressed vowel in her.
and sherbet.
The vowels are obscure because there is no specific letter assigned to
represent them. The vowel in her is also found in urban
and the terminal vowel in other
is found in ago.
see
schwa 'other /Ld'r/'an'other
/'nLd'r/
Alphabetical Order alphabetical
order
is mostly likely a vestige of a time when the alphabet doubled as a number
system. The ancient semitic alphabet and the Greek alphabet used
the letter shapes as numbers. The order is often retained when adapted
to other languages that have a separate number system.
Alphabetical
order is
similar in all Western languages because they all adopted and adapted the
Roman alphabet in the 9-10th century. The Roman's based their alphabet
on Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician models. For the Greeks and Phoenicians,
the alphabet doubled as a number system. The conventional order of the
letters can be traced back 3000 years. There may have been some significance
to the order, but it has been lost. The most promising
speculation
is that the order was related to astrology.
The Egyptian language had about 22 consonant sounds and 4 semi-vowels. Most sounds had 2 or 3 representations. Egyptian vowels were not clearly represented and not all that important for determining the meaning of a word. Some conventions were developed for Middle Egyptian and used to sound out foreign place names. In addition, Egyptian had semagrams [called determinants] which suggested the meaning of the word. Ancient Egyptian had numerous homophones which may account for the hybrid system of sound [phonograms] and meaning [semagrams] representation that they developed. A word written in hieroglyphics would have both phonological and semantic markers. (see Henu). Simplicity never seems to have been a primary goal of the Egyptians. They did introduce short hand versions of hieroglyphics to make the letters easier to draw but they never tried to simplify the system which combined more than the minimum number of sound signs with other symbols used as semantic determinants. The probable reason for never adopting a phonetic script was the great number of homonyms in ancient Egyptian. Their writing system did not consistently indicate vowels so the transcription added to the number of words that would be spelled the same. Although cumbersome to write [see Twain], Egyptian is probably easier to read than any other ancient writing system. The exact pronunciation is unknown but it is usually possible to figure out the meaning. As originally conceived by the Egyptians and Semites, the marks used to transcribe and preserve speech had three references. A sound, a common word in the language which began with that sound, and a representation of that word. Ideally, there would be one and only one written symbol for each significant sound category and many languages approach this ideal (e.g., Finnish, Korean, Turkish). It is difficult to represent each separate sound by a separate symbol in a living language because (1) there are often not enough symbols and (2) the way that people pronounce words changes over time. Alfabets are efficient for languages with over 30 phonemes. English has around 40. When there are less than 5 vowels and 30 phonemes as in Japanese and Hawaiian, syllabaries may be superior. A syllabary represents each separate syllable (usually a sequence of from one to four spoken sounds pronounced as an uninterrupted unit) by a single symbol. Japanese, for example, has two complete syllabaries - the hiragana and the katakana - devised to supplement the characters originally taken over from Chinese. A pictographic system represents
picturable objects, for example, a drawing of the sun stands for the spoken
word sun. An ideographic system combines various pictographs for the purpose
of indicating nonpicturable ideas. Thus, the Chinese pictographs for sun
and tree are combined to represent the Chinese spoken word for east.
letter
shapes - Historically,
most shapes [sign designs] were representational or pictographic.
From 3500 B.C. to 900 B.C. when the Greeks adopted a variant of the
Phoenician alphabet, the letter names referred to the object referenced
by the letter shape. R can still be seen as a picture of a head with
a beard. In the Semitic
language resh meant head and the beard or the Egyptian glyph [ ]
was shaved off as in the Greek rho [Rr].
Most of the roman letters are simple combinations of lines and loops or
arcs and vectors
letter facts
B. STABILITY OF GRAPHEME PHONEME CORRESPONDENCES No alphabet is stable. Any alphabet used by peoples with different language heritages undergoes modification. What changes is pronunciation. If left unchecked, these language pronunciation changes will lead to a degeneration of the alphabetic principle. Most languages need to be adjusted every 50 years or so to maintain the alphabetic principle. English has not been reformed or adjusted for 900 years which accounts for the high number of inconsistencies and irregularities found in the orthography. Alphabets require periodic respelling to keep them aligned with pronunciation. To retain an alphabet or consistent grapheme phoneme correspondence, periodic respelling is required. This is because word pronunciation changes particularly when the language is used by peoples with different language heritages. This process accelerates the use of loan words based on different spelling principles. There may be attempts to get people to continue to pronounce words according to the way their grandfather's pronounced them, but this is of only limited effectiveness. Writing is a great barrier to language change, English speech has changed very little since 1775 when it was standardized at the word level. This does not mean that everyone pronounced words the same but rather than the variability of speech habits is no greater today than in 1775. Unfortunately, Caxton adopted the spelling practices of 15th century writers. Normally this would have been OK but this standardization came just before the great vowel shift when the pronunciation of hundreds of words changed. just before English speech went through a major Such is the case with respect both to the number and form of letters used and to the subscripts and superscripts, or diacritical marks (accents, cedillas, tildes, dots, and others), used with the basic symbols to indicate or mark modifications of sound. The letter c with a cedilla, for instance, appears regularly in French, Portuguese, and Turkish, but rarely, except in borrowed words, in English. The value of ç in French, Portuguese, and English is that of s, but in Turkish it represents the ch sound in *church. It used to represent ts in Spanish, but that sound no longer exists in standard Spanish. So, too, letters have different sound values in different languages. The letter j /dzh/, for example, as in English jam, has a i:-y sound in German. Spelling pronunciation has probably led to the pronunciation of Yahova as Jahova. Although alphabets develop as attempts to establish a correspondence between sound and symbol, unless there are frequent respellings most alphabetically written languages become unphonetic. This is largely because the system of writing remains static while the spoken language evolves. Thus, the spelling of the English word knight reflects the pronunciation of an earlier period of the language, when the initial k was pronounced and the gh represented a sound, since lost, similar to the German ch in Wacht. The divergence between the written and spoken forms of certain languages, particularly English, has prompted movements for spelling reform. [List of spelling reforms]. See also Language; Runes; Shorthand;
Writing and articles on the individual letters and languages.
The Great Vowel Shift, a major change in the pronunciation of vowels during the 15th and 16th centuries, marks the transition from Middle English to Modern English. This change, termed the Great Vowel Shift by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, consisted of a shift in the articulation of vowels with respect to the positions assumed by the tongue and the lips. The Great Vowel Shift changed the pronunciation of 18 of the 20 distinctive vowels and diphthongs of Middle English. Spelling, however, remained unchanged and was preserved from then on as a result of the advent of printing in England about 1475, during the shift. (In general, Middle English orthography was much more phonetic than Modern English; all consonants, for example, were pronounced, whereas now letters such as the L preserved in *walking /woking/ are silent). All long vowels, with the exception of /i:/ (pronounced in Middle English somewhat like ee in need) and /û/ (pronounced in Middle English like oo in food), came to be pronounced with the jaw position one degree higher. Pronounced previously in the highest possible position, the /i:/ became diphthongized to “ah-ee,” and the/u:/ to “ee-oo.” The Great Vowel Shift, which
may still be in progress, caused the pronunciation in English of the letters
a, e, i, o, and u to differ from that used in most other languages of Western
Europe. The approximate date when words were borrowed from other languages
can be ascertained by means of these and other sound changes. Thus it is
known that the old French word dame was borrowed before the shift,
since its vowel shifted with the Middle English /a:/ from a pronunciation
like that of the vowel in calm to that of the vowel in day
and name.
In the early part of the Modern English period the vocabulary was enlarged by the widespread use of one part of speech for another and by increased borrowings from other languages. The revival of interest in Latin and Greek during the Renaissance brought new words into English from those languages. Other words were introduced by English travelers and merchants after their return from journeys on the Continent. From Italian came cameo, stanza, and violin; from Spanish and Portuguese, alligator, peccadillo, and sombrero. During its development, Modern English borrowed words from more than 50 different languages. In the late 17th century and during the 18th century, certain important grammatical changes occurred. The formal rules of English grammar were established during that period. The pronoun its came into use,
replacing the genitive form his, which was the only form used by the translators
of the King James Bible (1611). The progressive tenses developed from the
use of the participle as a noun preceded by the preposition on; the preposition
gradually weakened to a and finally disappeared. Thereafter only the simple
ing form of the verb remained in use. After the 18th century this process
of development culminated in the creation of the progressive passive form,
for example, “The job is being done.” The most important development begun
during this period and continued without interruption throughout the 19th
and 20th centuries concerned vocabulary. As a result of colonial expansion,
notably in North America but also in other areas of the world, many new
words entered the English language. From the indigenous peoples of North
America, the words raccoon and wigwam were borrowed; from Peru, llama and
quinine; from the West Indies, barbecue and cannibal; from Africa, chimpanzee
and zebra; from India, bandanna, curry, and punch; and from Australia,
kangaroo and boomerang. In addition, thousands of scientific terms were
developed to denote new concepts, discoveries, and inventions. Many of
these terms, such as neutron, penicillin, and supersonic, were formed from
Greek and Latin roots; others were borrowed from modern languages, as with
blitzkrieg from German and sputnik from Russian.
In Great Britain at present the speech of educated persons is known as Received Standard English. A class dialect rather than a regional dialect, it is based on the type of speech cultivated at such schools as Eton and Harrow and at such of the older universities as Oxford and Cambridge. Many English people who speak regional dialects in their childhood acquire Received Standard English (or RP) while attending school and university. Its influence has become even stronger in recent years because of its use by such public media as the British Broadcasting Corp. Widely differing regional and local dialects are still employed in the various counties of Great Britain. Other important regional dialects have developed also; for example, the English language in Ireland has retained certain individual peculiarities of pronunciation, such as the pronunciation of lave for leave and fluther for flutter; certain syntactical peculiarities, such as the use of after following forms of the verb be; and certain differences in vocabulary, including the use of archaic words such as adown (for down) and Celtic borrowings such as banshee. The Lowland Scottish dialect, sometimes called Lallans, first made known throughout the English-speaking world by the songs of the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns, contains differences in pronunciation also, such as neebour (“neighbor”) and guid (“good”), and words of Scandinavian origin peculiar to the dialect, such as braw and bairn. The English spoken in Australia, with its marked diphthongization of vowels, also makes use of special words, retained from English regional dialect usages, or taken over from indigenous Australian terms. guid fud, puit mai fuit intu
the shu.
An important development of English outside Great Britain occurred with the colonization of North America. American English may be considered to include the English spoken in Canada, although the Canadian variety retains some features of British pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary. The most distinguishing differences between American English and British English are in pronunciation and vocabulary. There are slighter differences in spelling, pitch, and stress as well. Written American English also has a tendency to be more rigid in matters of grammar and syntax, but at the same time appears to be more tolerant of the use of neologisms. Despite these differences, it is often difficult to determine-apart from context-whether serious literary works have been written in Great Britain or the U.S./Canada-or, for that matter, in Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. See American English. 
orthography - literally
right writing [rait raiting]
The art of spelling, that is, of setting down the component letters of words correctly according to accepted usage. In Western European languages there have always been fewer symbols than sounds, so orthography has rarely been a completely reliable guide to the pronunciation of a word. However, there is a difference between an ambiguity of two possible sounds and an ambiguity of 20 possible sounds. Inconsistencies
The introduction of printing did not solve the problems of orthography. The control of spelling merely passed from writers to printers, who did what they pleased with an author's spelling. The 16th and 17th centuries show a considerable degree of variation in spelling; a phonetic basis for orthography had been largely abandoned, but a uniformity based on prevailing usage had not yet been established. Pronunciation also continued to change, and spelling not only ceased to be a guide to pronunciation, but in many cases became a hindrance. Only in the 18th century, with Samuel Johnson's dictionary, and particularly in the 19th century, did English spelling become fixed. Consistency of Spanlish It is almost impossible to create an orthography where there is one and only one way to represent every sound. Sounds and symbols
A simplified form of the English
language based on 850 key words was developed in
the late 1920s by the English psychologist Charles Kay Ogden and publicized
by the English educator I. A. Richards. Known as BASIC English, it was
used mainly to teach English to non-English-speaking persons and promoted
as an international language. The complexities of English spelling and
grammar, however, were major hindrances to the adoption of Basic English
as a second language. The fundamental principle of Basic English was that
any idea, however complex, may be reduced to simple units of thought and
expressed clearly by a limited number of everyday words. The 850-word primary
vocabulary was composed of 600 nouns (representing things or events), 150
adjectives (for qualities and properties), and 100 general “operational”
words, mainly verbs and prepositions. Almost all the words were in common
use in English-speaking countries; more than 60 percent were one-syllable
words. The abbreviated vocabulary was created in part by eliminating numerous
synonyms and by extending the use of 18 “basic” verbs, such as make, get,
do, have, and be. These verbs were generally combined with prepositions,
such as up, among, under, in, and forward. For example, a Basic English
student would use the expression “go up” instead of “ascend.” H Pidgin
English English also enters into a number of simplified languages that
arose among non-English-speaking peoples. Pidgin English (see Pidgin),
spoken in the Melanesian islands, New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines,
and Hawaii and on the Asian shores of the Pacific Ocean, developed as a
means of communication between Chinese and English traders. The Chinese
adopted many English words and a few indispensable non-English words and
created a means of discourse, using a simple grammatical apparatus. Bêche-de-Mer,
a pidgin spoken in the southern and western Pacific islands, is predominantly
English in structure, although it includes many Polynesian words. Chinook
Jargon, used as a lingua franca by the Native Americans, French, and English
on the North American Pacific coast, contains English, French, and Native
American words; its grammatical structure is based on that of the Chinook
language. The use of pidgin is growing in Africa, notably in Cameroon,
Sierra Leone, and East Africa. The invention of printing in the 15th century
proved to be a powerful force in standardizing spellings. Many present-day
English spellings were standardized at that time and faithfully represent
15th-century pronunciations; English, however, subsequently underwent significant
shifts in pronunciation. Most of the remaining modern spelling conventions
were established as such by the dictionaries of the English lexicographer
Samuel Johnson in 1755 and the American lexicographer Noah Webster in 1828.
In English, the p sound is a phoneme because it is the smallest
unit of sound that can make a difference of meaning if, for example, it
replaces the initial sound of bill, till, or dill, making the word pill.
Speakers of Spanish share a common linguistic system and a common grammar. Although inhabitants of the various provinces of Spain and the various countries have slightly differing vocabularies and pronunciation, and use different expressions, these variations do not hamper communication. A Phonetics The Spanish alphabet consists of 28 letters: a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, x, y, and z. The vowels of this alphabet (a, e, i, o, u) sound roughly like the English words ha, hay, he, ho, and who. The Spanish language also contains
14
diphthongs (speech sounds) that combine the strong vowels (a, e, o)
with the weak ones (i, u) to create distinct sounds. Examples of these
are ue, as in bueno (good), and io, as in dios (god). The letter y serves
as both a consonant, as in yodo (iodine), and a semivowel, as in bueyes
(oxen). Unlike vowels, the consonants of the Spanish alphabet
cannot
be combined to create new sounds (except h). However, there are some
notable issues with consonants. The consonants b and v are pronounced very
similarly to each other, as are ll and
y. Spanish speakers
also drop h sounds at the beginning of words, so that horario (schedule)
and historia (history) are pronounced as if they were spelled orario
and istoria. These three elements of the language account for the
most common mistakes made by people learning Spanish as a second language:
confusing a b with a v, mistaking an ll for a y, and adding the h sounds
to the beginning of words with a silent h. Most Spanish words are pronounced
with the stress on the second-to-last syllable. Words ending in consonants
other than n or s, however, are stressed on the last syllable. Words whose
pronunciation requires the stress to fall on a syllable other than the
second-to-last or last syllable, or that require the breakup of a diphthong,
carry an accent mark on the vowel of the stressed syllable. Examples of
these situations are pájaro (bird), with the accent on the first
a, and día (day), with the i and a sounds pronounced distinctly.
In rare words, an umlaut over the u (ü) indicates that a u should
not form part of a diphthong. One important punctuation note is that questions
and exclamations in written forms are indicated by an inverted question
mark (¿) or exclamation point (¡) at the beginning of the
sentence and then a standard one at the end of the sentence.
The Spanish alphabet consists of 28 letters: a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, x, y, and z. The vowels of this alphabet (a, e, i, o, u) sound roughly like the English words ha, hay, he, ho, and who. The Spanish language also contains 14 diphthongs (speech sounds) that combine the strong vowels (a, e, o) with the weak ones (i, u) to create distinct sounds. Examples of these are ue, as in bueno (good), and io, as in dios (god). The letter y serves as both a consonant, as in yodo (iodine), and a semivowel, as in bueyes (oxen). Unlike vowels, the consonants of the Spanish alphabet cannot be combined to create new sounds. However, there are some notable issues with consonants. The consonants b and v are pronounced very similarly to each other, as are ll and y. Spanish speakers also drop h sounds at the beginning of words, so that horario (schedule) and historia (history) are pronounced as if they were spelled orario and istoria. These three elements of the language account for the most common mistakes made by people learning Spanish as a second language: confusing a b with a v, mistaking an ll for a y, and adding the h sounds to the beginning of words with a silent h. Most Spanish words are pronounced with the stress on the second-to-last syllable. Words ending in consonants other than n or s, however, are stressed on the last syllable. Words whose pronunciation requires the stress to fall on a syllable other than the second-to-last or last syllable, or that require the breakup of a diphthong, carry an accent mark on the vowel of the stressed syllable. Examples of these situations are pájaro (bird), with the accent on the first a, and día (day), with the i and a sounds pronounced distinctly. In rare words, an umlaut over the u (ü) indicates that a u should not form part of a diphthong. One important punctuation note is that questions and exclamations in written forms are indicated by an inverted question mark (¿) or exclamation point (¡) at the beginning of the sentence and then a standard one at the end of the sentence. Conference Report: Several researchers reported that, as dyslexic/learning disabled students already know, English spelling and lack of regularity in phonological patterns is indeed an obstacle to reading and spelling efficiently. One person even contended that "English is a dyslexic language." With its many irregularities and vast vocabulary, he said, English actually causes greater numbers of dyslexics than other languages do, a finding ascribed to by at least two of the keynote speakers. [more] [more]
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| Egyptian alphabet hieroglyphicshieroglyphicsEg. hieroglyphics Eg. dictionary Eg. resource | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Athens
Is there a book that combines a pronunciation guide with etymology? OED?  Many
books make a half hearted effort to do both. I want a dictionary
that is strong in both respects.
1. Is the rate of dyslexia correlated with the regularity of a languages
code? (For native speakers)
You could review existing numbers from various countries. I am not certain
2. Could (not the symptoms) dyslexia be eliminated or reduced by
simplifying the code? (What is the
Conclusions could come from some of the other elements of your paper.
Ones that lead to prevention
Go to a reading journal, or a journal that deals with dyslexia. Not
a middle school journal.
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| http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/sitemap-l.html ODI OBI kayaks-Dallas |
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if
EngliS wer ritcn in Dis cOd, Der wvd bE a wcn tu wcn corcspondens bytwEn
saundz and letcrz.
]. The only
difference between '
and the [uh] sound in up is 
/*odd,
pot
