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Why spelling rules
are important?
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Each language may make rules governing the relationship between letters and phonemes, but, according to the language, they may or may not be consistently followed. In a perfectly phonological Alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word by its spelling.
However, languages often evolve independently of their writing systems and writing systems have been borrowed for languages that were not designed, so that the degree to which letters of an Alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.
Languages may fail to achieve one-to-one relationship between letters and sounds in any of several ways
- A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of letters instead of just a single letter. Two letter combinations are called digraphs and letters from three groups are called trigraphs. The German language uses the tesseragraphs (four letters) "tsch" to the phoneme [tʃ] and "DSCH" for [dʒ], although the latter is rare. Kabardian also uses a tesseragraph for one of its phonemes.
- A language may represent the same phoneme with two different letters or letter combinations. An example is the modern Greek you can write the phoneme / i / in six different ways: "ι", "η", "υ", "ει", "οι" and "υι" (although the latter is very rare .)
- A language may spell some words are pronounced letter for historical reasons or otherwise. For example, the spelling of the Thai word for "beer" [เบียร์] maintains a letter to present "r" of the final consonant in the English word. Otherwise, in accordance with rules of pronunciation of Thailand, the word could be pronounced "bean".
- Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence around words in a sentence (sandhi).
- Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same word.
- A language may use different sets of symbols or different rules for different sets of vocabulary items, like the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabary, or different rules for spelling English words from Latin and Greek, or the original Germanic vocabulary.
- National languages in general, choose to solve the problem of dialects simply associating the Alphabet with the national standard. However, with an international language with wide variations in dialects such as English, it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations, with a single phonetic Alphabet.
- Some national languages, such as Finland, Turkey and Bulgaria have a very regular spelling system with a near one to one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Strictly speaking, no word on it, Turkish and Bulgarian for the Finnish word "written" (ie, to divide a word into its letters), the value rather than a verb that means to divide a word into its syllables. Similarly, the Italian word for 'spell', compitare, is unknown to many Italians because the act of writing itself is not nearly needed: each phoneme of Standard Italian is represented in one way. However, pronunciation can not always be predicted from the spelling in cases of irregular syllabic stress.
- In the Spanish standard, it is possible to know the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa, this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is always pronounced. By their silence, some letters and his heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem that both the lack of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules of pronunciation are actually consistent and predictable, with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
- At the other extreme are languages like English where the spelling of many words simply must be memorized, and which do not correspond to sounds in a consistent manner. For the English language, this is partly because the Great Vowel change came after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loans at different times, while retaining their original spelling at different levels. Even the English have in general, but complex rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are the most successful of the era, the spelling rules to predict the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.
- Sometimes, countries have written language undergoing a spelling reform to realign the spoken language written today. These can range from simple changes in spelling and word forms to change the entire writing system itself, as when Turkey changed the Arabic alphabet to the Roman alphabet.
- Speech sounds of all languages of the world, can be written by a small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the International Phonetic Alphabet.