Orthography

The spelling or orthography ( Orthos Greek ὀρθός, upright ', ' right ' and tomography ) or spelling ( since the second half of the 16th century as a translation of the Greek-Latin. Terminus Orthographia ) is the generally accepted spelling of the words of a language in the used font. A different case is commonly referred to as spelling errors.

Spelling in alphabetic writing

When spelling in alphabetic writing there are two fundamentally different approaches:

• Phonemic spelling (shallow orthography ), which aims at the simplest possible relationship between sound sequence and typeface ( " write as you speak " ), and in the ideal case, a grapheme corresponds to exactly one phoneme (spelling with 1:1 correspondence ), and
• The morphophonemic spelling (deep orthography ), the grammatical and beyond also spoke often historical ( etymological ) derivation relationships between different words and in particular between the conjugate, komparierten or declined forms of a word can be visible.

The phonemic approach usually refers to only one standard variety of the language. In this sense predominantly phonemic orthography is, for example, the Bulgarian, Finnish, Georgian, Italian, Serbian, Spanish and Turkish. The orthography of Spanish about is more phonemic than, for example, the Argentine or Cuban (both admittedly not see themselves as subordinate dialects, but just as the Argentine and Cuban high-level language ) for the Castilian Spanish.

The strong etymological embossed morphophonemic orthography of English is particularly striking. In English, a sequence of letters (eg ough ) four or more different pronunciations have; conversely, a certain sequence of sounds have many different spellings, depending on in which word it occurs, for example, the sound [ ʃ ] ( sh ) as the ocean, fish, action, sure, etc. See also: ghoti.

Even the French writes decided etymologically. Featured France his orthography on a purely phonemic basis, the family resemblance of the French with the other Romance languages ​​would be hardly recognizable. In French, a sound many have different spellings (eg, the grapheme au, aud, auds, ault, Aulx, aut, AUTS, aux, eau eaud, eaux, skin, Hauts, ho, o, ô, od, ods, oh, os, ot, ots).

The orthography of the German has both phonemic and morphophonemic elements ( not shown devoicing, e / ä notation, and others), but with relatively few etymological spellings ( with the exception of many recent foreign words and some homophones ). Especially with loans from English spelling is rarely adapted to the German phonetic picture ( biscuit, strike, but not ( grain ) Fleks, kompjuter, Marschmelloh etc.). However, some Eindeutschungen were introduced (eg ketchup, Wallet ), but these were not consistently continued with the spelling reform of 1996 in this area.