Language and Orthography
Instructor: Tsueifen Chen
Orthography, Script, and Writing System
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system
A writing system is a symbolic system used
to represent elements or statements
expressible in language.
What is orthography?
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Orthography describes or defines the set
of symbols (graphemes and diacritics)
used, and the rules about how to write
these symbols.
Most natural languages developed as oralaural languages, and writing systems have
usually been crafted or adapted
afterwards as representations of the
spoken language.
Introduction to English and Chinese
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English, Italian, Finnish as alphabetic languages
Chinese as an morpho-syllabic language
Alphabetic languages: Grapheme-phoneme
correspondences (letter-sound correspondences)—
the relationships between letters and sounds
Morpho-syllabic languages: morpheme-syllable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography
English orthography
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English as an alphabetic language
What is alphabetic language?
Phoneme
Grapheme
Phoneme-grapheme correspondences
Phonemes
Phoneme: a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound
in a language which can distinguish two words.
e.g. cat vs. bat /k/ vs. /b/
 English has 26 letters, 40 phonemes (25 consonant
sounds and 15 vowels)
 See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography
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Graphemes
Grapheme: a grapheme is a minimal unit in a
writing system
 Graphemes are the letters and letter
combinations forming patterns found in words
e.g. /i/: e (me), e-e (scheme), ee (greet),
ea (seat), ie (thief), y (lady), ey (alley),
ei (ceiling)
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Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
One-to-one correspondence
e.g.
 One-to-two correspondence (a single phoneme with
two graphemes): digraphs
e.g.
 One-to three correspondence (a single phoneme
with three graphemes): trigraphs
Some exceptions: “box” has 4 phonemes /b/ /a/ /k/ /s/
and 3 graphemes; some say 4 phonemes and 4
graphemes
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Exercise
Group assignment: (1)find out the 40
phonemes of English, (2) give students some
words and ask them to figure out how many
phonemes are there in those words.
Chinese orthography
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Chinese as a morpho-syllabic language
What is morpho-syllabic language
Morpheme
Syllable
Character
Word
Chinese orthography continues…
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Definition of morpheme
Definition of syllable
What is a character?
One-character word; two-character word;
three-character word
Exercise
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Ask students to think of some Chinese words
that are one-character, two-character, threecharacter, and four-character.
Learning Chinese and English
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How many English words are there?
How many Chinese words are there?
How many English words do we have to
know?
How many Chinese words do we have to
know?
Comparisons between English and
Chinese
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Chinese as a dead language
Literacy requirement: knowing 4000 Chinese
characters is basic, while in English…
Writing difference: the layout is different
(spacing, square, etc.)
1.5 Chinese character = 1 English word