Talk:Orthography

Phonetic orthographies

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the orthographies of languages such as Russian, German, and Spanish represent pronunciation much more faithfully, although the correspondence between letters and phonemes is still not exact. Finnish, Turkish, and Serbo-Croatian orthographies more consistently approximate the principle of "one letter per sound."

One letter per sound is not the correct criterion: there is nothing wrong with digraphs in faithful orthography, as long as they are unambiguous. And there is nothing wrong with representing phonemes rather than sounds as long as the sound is predictable. Also, I question whether the last three languages are any more faithful than the first three. In particular, Turkish orthography does not write stress and I vowel length, and Serbo-croatian does not write tone and vowel length. Can we find a reliable source for all this? --Macrakis (talk) 18:42, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

The correct way to articulate this idea is that there is a clear correspondence between functional units of writing and the sounds of speech. There's a bit of disagreement in the literature as to whether digraphs should could as graphemes in this way, but in any case a clear distinction can be made. Per the content, It's quite pointless to indulge in listing examples here at any length: people often enjoy tacking on their language to lists like these and it does nothing but make them smile in the act of adding it. Certainly doesn't help the reader.Remsense ‥ 论 21:09, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

[Language] Orthography vs. [Language] Alphabet pages

I want to question the need for two separate "Orthography" and "Alphabet" pages for individual languages. Some languages have both (e.g. English orthography, English alphabet), whereas some only have an Orthography page (Dutch orthography, French orthography), and some only have an Alphabet page (Bulgarian alphabet). The inconsistency is confusing, but I would ask why these even need to be two separate pages; unlike broader scripts that exist as their own entity (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hangul), it seems like "how this language is written" is a singular topic, and it would make sense to have it all on one page. The distinction, when it exists, seems to be that "Alphabet" has the default sound values, and "Orthography" is opaque spelling rules. However, if you're interested in how these interact (e.g. both the default values for letters, and how they change in digraphs or in context), you have to tab back and forth. Overall, it seems like they could just be collapsed into a uniform Orthography page for every language.

(I'm not sure the best place to put this, since it encompasses the Orthography and Alphabet pages for every language. If there is a better place to put it, I would appreciate the pointer!) Ljshamz (talk) 21:08, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

An "alphabet" is a set collection of letters used to write corresponding sounds of a particular language, while "orthography" is a broader term covering the rules used when writing a particular language. I would consider the former a subset of the latter, which also includes matters of punctuation and other conventions beyond how letters correspond to the sounds of a language. There's no well-defined distinction in my mind between "surface-level" and "opaque" spelling rules, though there is significant work in the literature trying to quantify those. I hope that makes sense. It's possible we could have one "orthography" page for each language, but I'm curious what others think.Remsense ‥ 论 00:05, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with your analysis and also agree with Remsense's subset principle. Ideally (but probably not realistically), we should have an orthography article for each language which contains a section about its alphabet. BUT that is a huge ask and would need expert contributors: orthography is a very complex subject. Getting that expertise written in English for en.wikipedia adds to the challenge.The reason we have alphabet articles is that they are a lot easier to do and generally present a bounded problem. Phoneme/grapheme mapping (especially regional) is probably the only difficult aspect.

So great idea but I don't know how it can come achieved. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 08:03, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I also agree that one page should handle all information for a particular language, and the orthography page should be the one kept for everything. Beyond that it would make sense to have pages for scripts that are used as the basis for the orthographies of individual languages, and they may be called "alphabet", such as Latin alphabet or Cyrillic alphabet, but otherwise I don't think we need separate alphabet pages. I agree with JMF that implementing this would be a lot of work, and will create a lot of heat on the pages where it happens... LandLing 11:15, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

The pragmatic issue immediately apparent to me is orthography is frankly jargon for our most general audience, and topics of spelling and alphabet inventory etc. are considerably high traffic, so some of that heat I fear will be informed by genuine confusion. Should we be concerned that these mergers would make for a worse reading experience? Remsense ‥ 论 03:28, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Redirects should help to find the correct pages in any case, as my link to Cyrillic alphabet above actually redirects to Cyrillic script. Everybody should continue to have a swell reading experience. LandLing 06:18, 7 November 2024 (UTC)