Editing Orthography (section)

== Correspondence with pronunciation ==
Orthographies that use [[alphabet]]s and [[syllabaries]] are based on the principle that written graphemes correspond to units of sound of the spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and [[syllable]]s in the latter. In virtually all cases, this correspondence is not exact. Different languages' orthographies offer different degrees of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. [[English orthography|English]], [[French orthography|French]], [[Danish orthography|Danish]], and [[Thai orthography|Thai]] orthographies, for example, are highly irregular, whereas the orthographies of languages such as [[Russian language|Russian]], [[German language|German]], [[Spanish language|Spanish]], [[Finnish language|Finnish]], [[Turkish language|Turkish]], and [[Serbo-Croatian]] represent pronunciation much more faithfully.{{Citation needed|date=September 2022}}

An orthography in which the correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are highly complex or inconsistent is called a ''[[deep orthography]]'' (or less formally, the language is said to have ''irregular spelling''). An orthography with relatively simple and consistent correspondences is called ''shallow'' (and the language has ''regular spelling'').

One of the main reasons why spelling and pronunciation diverge is that [[sound change]]s taking place in the spoken language are not always reflected in the orthography, and hence spellings correspond to historical rather than present-day pronunciation. One consequence of this is that many spellings come to reflect a word's [[morphophonemic]] structure rather than its purely phonemic structure (for example, the English regular past tense morpheme is consistently spelled ''-ed'' in spite of its different pronunciations in various words). This is discussed further at {{slink|Phonemic orthography|Morphophonemic features}}.

The [[syllabaries]] in the [[Japanese writing system]] ([[hiragana]] and [[katakana]]) are examples of almost perfectly shallow orthographies—the kana correspond with almost perfect consistency to the spoken syllables, although with a few exceptions where symbols reflect historical or morphophonemic features: notably the use of ぢ ''ji'' and づ ''zu'' (rather than じ ''ji'' and ず ''zu'', their pronunciation in standard Tokyo dialect) when the character is a voicing of an underlying ち or つ (see [[rendaku]]), and the use of は, を, and へ to represent the sounds わ, お, and え, as relics of [[historical kana usage]].

Korean [[hangul]] and [[Tibetan script]]s were also originally extremely shallow orthographies, but as a representation of the modern language those frequently also reflect morphophonemic features.

=== Defective orthographies ===
An orthography based on a correspondence to phonemes may sometimes lack characters to represent all the phonemic distinctions in the language. This is called a [[defective orthography]]. An example in English is the lack of any indication of [[stress (linguistics)|stress]].{{citation needed|date=May 2024}} Another is the [[digraph (orthography)|digraph]] {{gph|th}}, which represents two different phonemes (as in ''then'' and ''thin'') and replaced the old letters {{gph|[[ð]]}} and {{gph|[[þ]]}}. A more systematic example is that of [[abjad]]s like the [[Arabic alphabet|Arabic]] and [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew]] alphabets, in which the short vowels are normally left unwritten and must be inferred by the reader.

When an alphabet is borrowed from its original language for use with a new language—as has been done with the [[Latin alphabet]] for many languages, or Japanese [[katakana]] for non-Japanese words—it often proves defective in representing the new language's phonemes. Sometimes this problem is addressed by the use of such devices as digraphs (such as {{gph|sh}} and {{gph|ch}} in English, where pairs of letters represent single sounds), [[diacritic]]s (like the [[caron]] on the letters {{gph|š}} and {{gph|č}}, which represent those same sounds in [[Czech language|Czech]]), or the addition of completely new symbols (as some languages have introduced the letter {{gph|[[w]]}} to the Latin alphabet) or of symbols from another alphabet, such as the [[rune]] {{gph|[[þ]]}} in Icelandic.

After the classical period, Greek developed a lowercase letter system with diacritics to enable foreigners to learn pronunciation and grammatical features. As pronunciation of letters changed over time, the diacritics were reduced to representing the stressed syllable. In Modern Greek typesetting, this system has been simplified to only have a single accent to indicate which syllable is stressed.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bulley |first1=Michael |title=Spelling reform – a lesson from the Greeks: Learning from the Greeks about English spellings |journal=English Today |date=December 2011 |volume=27 |issue=4 |pages=71–72 |doi=10.1017/S0266078411000575 }}</ref>