Phonemic orthography
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A phonemic orthography is a writing system in which the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. In terms of orthographic depth, these are termed shallow orthographies, contrasting with deep orthographies. These are sometimes termed true alphabets, but non-alphabetic writing systems like syllabaries can be phonemic as well.
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[edit] Examples
Orthographies with a high grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include those of Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Turkish (apart from ğ), Macedonian (if the apostrophe is counted), Eastern Armenian (apart from o, v), Basque (apart from palatalized l, n), Castilian Spanish (apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z), Czech (apart from ě, ů, y, ý), Polish (apart from ó, h, rz), and Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties).
Hungarian and Korean are often said to be phonemic, but they are deep orthographies. Other superficially phonemic orthographies are slightly defective: Malay and Italian do not fully distinguish their vowels, Serbian and Croatian do not distinguish tone and vowel length, Somali does not distinguish vowel phonation, etc.
Many languages of India written in Brahmic scripts, such as Hindi (apart from schwa and nasal vowels) and Marathi,[citation needed] have phonemic orthographies.
Most constructed languages such as Esperanto and Lojban have mostly phonemic orthographies.
[edit] Dialects of English
As dialects of the English language vary significantly, it would be difficult to create a phonemic orthography that encompassed all of them. However, it is fairly easy to create one based on a standard accent such as Received Pronunciation. This would, however, exclude certain sound differences found in other accents, such as the bad–lad split in Australian English. With time, pronunciations change and spellings become out of date, as has happened to English and French. In order to maintain a phonemic orthography such a system would need periodic updating, as has been attempted by various language regulators and proposed by other spelling reformers.
[edit] Loan words
Phonemic orthography in a language is affected by the borrowing of loanwords from another written in the same alphabet but having different sound-to-spelling conventions. If the original spelling and pronunciation are both kept, then the spelling is "irregular": for example, fajita is pronounced /fəˈhiːtə/ to reflect the Spanish pronunciation of /faˈxita/, rather than /fəˈdʒaɪtə/ as the spelling would suggest under normal English spelling rules. Phonemicity may be preserved by nativizing the loanword's pronunciation as with the Russian word шофёр (from French chauffeur) which is pronounced [ʂɐˈfʲor] in accordance with the normal rules of Russian vowel reduction. Spelling pronunciation is another common phenomenon. Nativizing the spelling of loanwords is also common; for example, football is spelt fútbol in Spanish and futebol in Portuguese.
[edit] Assimilation
Phonological assimilation is ignored in many orthographies. For example, in the latinate word absolute, the b is pronounced like a p, and in a truly phonemic orthography it would be written as such. Yet even in otherwise phonemic orthographies such as Spanish, obtener 'obtain' and optimista 'optimist' are written differently, even though the distinction between the b and p is purely historical and has no basis in pronunciation. Turkish, on the other hand, transcribes assimilation phonemically. So, while the singular of German Baden 'baths' is spelled Bad despite being pronounced *Bat (see final-obstruent devoicing), the imperative of Turkish edir 'does' is spelled et, as it is pronounced. In this case, German is morphophonemic while Turkish is phonemic.
[edit] Difference from phonetic transcription
Methods for phonetic transcription such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) aim to describe pronunciation in a standard form. They are often used to solve ambiguities in the spelling of written language. They may also be used to write languages with no previous written form. Systems like IPA can be used for phonemic representation or for showing more detailed phonetic information (see Narrow vs. broad transcription).
Phonemic orthographies are different from phonetic transcription; whereas in a phonemic orthography, allophones will usually be represented by the same grapheme, a purely phonetic script would demand that phonetically distinct allophones be distinguished. To take an example from American English: the /t/ sound in the words "table" and "cat" would, in a phonemic orthography, be written with the same character; however, a strictly phonetic script would make a distinction between the aspirated "t" in "table", the flap in "butter", the unaspirated "t" in "stop" and the glottalized "t" in "cat" (not all these allophones exist in all English dialects). In other words, the sound that most English speakers think of as /t/ is really a group of sounds, all pronounced slightly differently depending on where they occur in a word. A perfect phonemic orthography has one letter per group of sounds (phoneme), with different letters only where the sounds distinguish words (so "bed" is spelled differently from "bet").
A narrow phonetic transcription represents phones, the atomic sounds humans are capable of producing, many of which will often be grouped together as a single phoneme in any given natural language, though the groupings vary across languages. English, for example, does not distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but other languages, like Bengali and Hindi, do.
