English and Chinese
Orthography
Instructor: Tsueifen Chen
Introduction to English and Chinese
orthography
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English is categorized as alphabetic
language while Chinese is categorized as
morpho-syllabic language.
English and Chinese have different writing
system.
As a result, learning English and Chinese
requires different processes and skills.
English orthography
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The modern English alphabet is a Latin-based
alphabet consisting of 26 letters. Of the 26 letters,
5 letters (i.e. a, e, i, o, u) represent vowels, and 21
letters represent consonants.
English letters (or graphemes) basically represent
phonemes.
Learning to read English requires forming connections
between graphemes and phonemes.
What is a phoneme?
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/; pat vs. mat
 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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What is grapheme?
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 correspondence
One-to-one correspondence
e.g. tip, cat,
 One-to-two correspondence (a single phoneme with
two graphemes): digraphs
e.g. book, ship, meet
 One-to three correspondence (a single phoneme with
three graphemes): trigraphs
e.g. schilling, beautiful
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Some exceptions: “box” has 4 phonemes /b/ /a/ /k/ /s/ and 3 graphemes;
some say 4 phonemes and 4 graphemes
Definition of terms
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A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to
write one phoneme (distinct sound), or else a
sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to
the normal values of the two characters combined.
A trigraph is a group of three letters used to
represent a single sound or a combination of sounds
that does not correspond to the written letters
combined.
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 is categorized as a morpho-syllabic
language.
The basic writing units of the Chinese
writing system are characters.
Each character represents a morpheme
morphologically and a syllable
phonologically, which is why it is a morphosyllabic language.
Chinese orthography continues…
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The relationship among the Chinese spoken and
written languages is rather complex. Its spoken
variations evolved at different rates, while written
Chinese itself has changed much less.
The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese
characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary
rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical
columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and
right to left across columns. Chinese characters are
morphemes independent of phonetic change.
What is a morpheme?
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A morpheme is the smallest meaningful
linguistic in a word.
In Chinese, 水 is a morpheme which has
meaning. As a result, every Chinese
character is a morpheme.
In English, the word ‘unbreakable’ has 3
morphemes: un, break, able.
Chinese characters and words
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Characters are the basic writing units of
Chinese.
Chinese words are formed by combining
characters, and are usually one-, two-, or
three-characters, such as 水 (water),氣球
(balloon),太空船 (spaceship).
60 percent of Chinese words are of two
characters.
Advantages and disadvantages of
logographic writing system
Separating writing and pronunciation
The main difference between logograms and other writing
systems is that the graphemes aren't linked directly to their
pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that one
doesn't need to understand the pronunciation or language of
the writer to understand it. The reader will recognize the
meaning of 1, whether it is called one, ichi or wāḥid in the
language of the writer. Likewise, people speaking different
Chinese dialects may not understand each other in speaking,
but can to a significant extent in writing even if they don't
write in standard Chinese. Therefore, in China, Vietnam,
Korea and Japan prior to modern times, communication by
writing (筆談) was the norm of international trade and
diplomacy.
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Advantages and disadvantages continue…
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This separation, however, also has the
great disadvantage of requiring the
memorization of the logograms when
learning to read and write, separately from
the pronunciation.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram
Learning Chinese
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Since logograms are visual symbols
representing words rather than the sounds
or phonemes that make up the word, it is
relatively easier to remember or guess the
sound of alphabetic written words, while it
might be relatively easier to remember or
guess the meaning of logograms.
Learning Chinese
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According to government-commissioned research, the
most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in PRC's
"Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese" (现
代汉语常用字表) cover 99.48% of a two-million-word
sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese
characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the "Chart
of Standard Forms of Common National Characters"
(常用國字標準字體表) by the Ministry of Education of
ROC, while 4,759 in the "Soengjung Zi Zijing Biu" (常
用字字形表) by the Education and Manpower Bureau
of Hong Kong, both of which are intended to be
taught during elementary and junior secondary
education.
Learning Chinese continues…
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Education after elementary school includes not as
many new characters as new words, which are
mostly combination of two or more alreadylearned characters. The significance of this is
that, after a relatively short term of education,
the learning of Chinese language for its native
speakers can become faster and easier, as they
no longer have to spend much time in memorizing
reading and writing of a new word, but rather
have to memorize its meaning.
Comparisons between English and
Chinese
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In alphabetic languages, letters are meaningless
symbols that represent sounds; whereas in Chinese,
the semantic radical gives hints at the meaning of the
character.
Knowing 4,300 Chinese characters would be
considered necessary for full literacy.
1.5 Chinese character = 1 English word
Learning the two languages requires different
method.
Exercise
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Ask students to think of some Chinese words
that are one-character, two-character, threecharacter, and four-character.