Defective script

In graphemics, a defective script is a writing system that does not represent all the phonemic distinctions of a language. This means that the concept is always relative to a given language. Taking the Latin alphabet used in Italian orthography as an example, the Italian language has seven vowels, but the alphabet has only five vowel letters to represent them; in general, the difference between the phonemes close and open is simply ignored, though stress marks, if used, may distinguish them. Among the Italian consonants, both and are written , and both and are written ; stress and hiatus are also not reliably distinguished.

In graphemics, a defective script is a writing system that does not represent all the phonemic distinctions of a language. This means that the concept is always relative to a given language. Taking the Latin alphabet used in Italian orthography as an example, the Italian language has seven vowels, but the alphabet has only five vowel letters to represent them; in general, the difference between the phonemes close and open is simply ignored, though stress marks, if used, may distinguish them. Among the Italian consonants, both and are written , and both and are written ; stress and hiatus are also not reliably distinguished. ==Ancient examples of defective script== Such shortcomings are not uncommon. The Greek alphabet was defective during its early history. Ancient Greek had distinctive vowel length: five short vowels, , and seven long vowels, . When the Phoenician alphabet was adapted to Greek, the names of five letters were pronounced by the Greeks with initial consonants made silent, and were then used acrophonically to represent vowels. These were alpha, e (later called e psilon), iota, o (later called o micron), and u (later called u psilon) – – five letters for twelve vowel sounds. (The lost initial consonants were .) Later the [h] (from ) dropped out from the Eastern Greek dialects, and the letter heta (now pronounced eta) became available; it was used for . About the same time, the Greeks created an additional letter, o mega, probably by writing o micron with an underline, that was used for . Digraphs and , no longer pronounced as diphthongs and , were adopted for and Thus, Greek entered its classical era with seven letters and two digraphs – – for twelve vowel sounds. Long were never distinguished from short , even though the distinction was meaningful. Although the Greek alphabet was a good match to the consonants of the language, it was defective when it came to some vowels. Other ancient scripts were also defective. Egyptian hieroglyphs had no vowel representation at all, while the cuneiform script frequently did not distinguish among a consonant triad like /t/, /d/ and /t'/ (emphatic /t/), or between the vowels /e/ and /i/. With only 16 characters, the Younger Futhark was an even more defective form of the Elder Futhark, from which it had evolved by the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries. At the same time, phonetic changes that led to a greater number of different phonemes in the spoken language, when Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse. As an example, the Younger Futhark no longer had separate signs for voiced stops and voiceless stops, so a rune like Týr (ᛏ) could represent all of /d/, /t/, /nd/ or /nt/. ==Modern examples of defective script== Languages with a long literary history have a tendency to freeze spelling at an early stage, leaving subsequent pronunciation shifts unrecorded. Such is the case with English, French, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai, among others. By contrast, some writing systems have been periodically respelled in accordance with changed pronunciation, such as Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Irish, and Japanese hiragana. Note that all of these languages indeed have long literary histories but have simply evolved where others did not. ===Latin script=== Some otherwise phonemic orthographies based on the Latin script are slightly defective: Malay (incl. Malaysian and Indonesian, where /e/ and /ə/ are written as ). Italian does not distinguish open-mid and close-mid vowels in stressed syllables; /s/ and /z/; /ts/ and /dz/. Maltese and Welsh do not distinguish most vowel length. Kazakh Lithuanian and Serbo-Croatian do not distinguish tone and vowel length (also additional vowels for Lithuanian). Latvian does not distinguish tone and some of its vowels. Somali does not distinguish vowel phonation and tone. ==Stenography systems== Stenography systems are normally defective writing systems, omitting redundant information for the sake of writing speed. Pitman shorthand, for instance, can be written while distinguishing only three vowel symbolizations for the first vowel of a word (high vowel, mid vowel, or low vowel), though there are optional diacritical methods for distinguishing more vowel qualities. Taylor shorthand, which was widely used in the first half of the 19th century, does not distinguish any vowels at all – there is just a dot when a word begins or ends with any vowel. ==Considerations== Defectiveness is a cline: the Semitic abjads do not indicate all vowels, but there are also alphabets which mark vowels but not tone (e.g. many African languages), or vowel quality but not vowel length (e.g. Latin). Even if English orthography were regularized, the English alphabet would still be incapable of unambiguously conveying intonation; since this is not expected of scripts, it is not normally counted as defectiveness. ==See also== Phonemic orthography Orthography in which there is an exact one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes and the phonemes of the language ==References==

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1378318858 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.