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Jan. 14, 2011 The orthography of a language is the set of standardized spellings that authoritative bodies prescribe as correct and that most writers adhere to. Etymologically, the word means correct writing. Some orthographic systems represent the accepted pronunciation of words fairly faithfully. Examples are German, Spanish and Greek. Others are fair, but have minor faults. Among these are Portuguese and Italian. Still others are very poor. Russian, Arabic and Hebrew fall in this category, but they could be corrected with fairly simple measures, which, although recognized, have never been adopted. Then there are miserable failures, most notably English. Forget about Chinese and Japanese, which are excluded entirely from this area of philological interest. Often I hear people commenting on this subject without knowing what they are talking about. For example, they will argue that Italian is just as phonetic as Spanish, but it’s not. In Italian, o, e, s, gl and gn each have two pronunciations. One cannot always guess which one applies in a given case: cosa (thing, pron.: caussa), rosa (rose, pron.: rauza); dopo (after, pron.: dopo). Another problem is that, if the penultimate syllable is short and open, the position of the word-accent is indeterminate. Compare: Napoli and Milano, accented on the first and second syllable, with no indication of this in spelling. These may seem trivial, but affect about 25% of Italian words. There are no such ambiguities in Spanish. All words are 100% pronounceable from the spelling, if you know the rules, which are complicated but consistent. There are regional differences though. Russian would be virtually perfect, if it had an accent mark. The location of the accent in Russian words varies completely unpredictably. Compare: zoloto (gold), boloto (swamp), moloko (milk). These have accents on the first, second and third syllable. The pronunciation of vowels, especially o, varies considerably in accordance with their position with respect to the accented syllable. Thus we have, using an asterisk for a shwa: zol*t*, balot*, m*lako. Adopting an accent mark was proposed to Tsar Peter and to Lenin, but both rejected the idea. So today, learning to pronounce Russian is a nightmare, as many of the collateral forms of nouns and verbs, e.g., genitive, accusative, future, past, are not in dictionaries. Arabic and Hebrew share the failing that the standardized writing shows only the consonants. Hebrew: zhv (gold, pron.: zahav). Arabic: jbl (mountain, pron.: jabal). Both Hebrew and Arabic have afterthought vowels that were invented centuries after the consonantal writing had been promulgated. Today, if you read the Tanakh (Bible) or the Qur’an, you will see the vowels, above and below the line, but in newspapers and books, they are merely omitted. Given the vowels, Hebrew is nearly perfect, as glides are indicated. For example, ruah (spirit) has an ahistorical a, i.e., it would have been ruh, but it is shown anyway. In Arabic, glides are not shown or indicated in dictionaries, so all you can do is guess and ask around. .Furthermore, there are mandatory breaks within Arabic words, for instance, after r and z. You don’t write the word as a single piece. Sometimes the intraword hiatuses are bigger than the interword hiatuses, so you can’t figure out where one word ends and another begins. Persian is like Arabic, but the problem is aggravated in that in older Persian books, there is no punctuation at all. Modern Greek is good. The only fault I know of is that the groups: nu-tau, mu-pi, and gamma-kappa each have three pronunciations: d, nd, nt: b, mb, mp; g, ngg, ngk. Greek does have an accent mark, so otherwise there are no dubieties. German is excellent. In Germanic words, the accent is on the first syllable, unless the first syllable is one of a number of prefixes that move the accent to the second. One such prefix is be-, so the word beginnen (begin) is accented on the second syllable. The only other problem is that words borrowed from other languages don’t follow this rule. So we have Direktor and Jurnal, with accent on the second syllable. French words are fairly guessable, but there are hundreds of irregularities. For example, in hier and aller, r is pronounced and silent. Some other languages apparently have easy spelling, e.g., Bahasa Malaysia, Finnish, Turkish, etc., but I know very little about these tongues. I don’t even want to talk about English. I wish I could get $10 an hour for all the hours I’ve spent checking and rechecking spellings and pronunciations in English. I’d be rich! ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written five books: ELEMENTS OF GRAMMAR and A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction); A TALE OF UNG, THE ENNUNMENT and GVAGMA (fiction). I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com
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