Alphabetic principle
Encyclopedia
According to the alphabetic principle, letter
s and combinations of letters are the symbol
s used to represent the speech sounds
of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words. The alphabetic principle is the foundation of any alphabetic writing system, which is one of the more common types of writing systems in use today.
Alphabetic writing systems that use an (in practice) almost perfectly phonemic orthography
have a single letter for each individual speech sound and a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them. Such systems are used, for example, in the modern languages Estonian
, Finnish
, Italian
, Spanish
, Polish
, Hungarian
and Turkish
. Such languages have a straightforward spelling
system, enabling a writer to predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation
and similarly enabling a reader to predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Ancient languages with such almost perfectly phonemic writing systems include Avestic
, Latin
, Vedic
, and Sanskrit
(Devanāgarī
/Abugida
, see also Vyakarana
).
On the other hand, French
and English
have a strong difference between sounds and symbols.
The alphabetic principle does not underlie logographic writing systems
like Chinese or syllabic writing systems
such as Japanese
kana
.
are imperfectly phonological and diverge from that ideal to a greater or lesser extent. This is because the ancient Romans designed the alphabet specifically for Latin. In the Middle Ages, it was adapted to the Romance languages, the direct descendants of Latin, as well as to the Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages, and finally to most of the languages of Europe.
is based on the alphabetic principle, but the acquisition of sounds and spellings from a variety of languages has made English spelling patterns confusing. Spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions but nearly every sound can be legitimately spelled with different letters or letter combinations. For example, the letters ee almost always represent /i/, but the sound can also be represented by the letter y.
The spelling systems for some languages, such as Spanish, are relatively simple because they adhere closely to the ideal one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them. For example, in standard Castilian Spanish
the letter u always represents the sound /u/. In English
the spelling system is more complex and varies considerably in the degree to which it follows the stated pattern. There are several reasons for this, including: first, the alphabet has 26 letters, but the English language has 40 sounds that must be reflected in word spellings; second, English spelling began to be standardized in the 15th century, and most spellings have not been revised to reflect the long-term changes in pronunciation that are typical for all languages; and third, English frequently adopts foreign words without changing the spelling of those words.
Understanding that there is a direct relationship between letters and sounds enables a reader to retrieve the pronunciation of an unknown word and associate it with a spoken word. Printed words in a child's vocabulary can be identified by sounding them out. Understanding the relationship of letters and sounds is also the foundation of learning to spell.
Two contrastiing beliefs for teaching this aspect of beginning reading exist.
Proponents of phonics argue that this relationship needs to be taught explicitly and learned to automaticity to facilitate rapid word recognition upon which comprehension depends.
Proponents of whole language approaches argue that reading should be taught holistically, and that children naturally intuit the relationship between letters and sounds. Focus on individual letters and sounds should be taught to be used only as a last resort, and that any phonics instruction given should be embedded within a holistic approach, that is to say, through mini-lessons in the context of authentic reading and writing tasks.
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
s and combinations of letters are the symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
s used to represent the speech sounds
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words. The alphabetic principle is the foundation of any alphabetic writing system, which is one of the more common types of writing systems in use today.
Alphabetic writing systems that use an (in practice) almost perfectly phonemic orthography
Phonemic orthography
A phonemic orthography is a writing system where the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. In terms of orthographic depth, these are termed shallow orthographies, contrasting with deep orthographies...
have a single letter for each individual speech sound and a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them. Such systems are used, for example, in the modern languages Estonian
Estonian language
Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...
, Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
and Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
. Such languages have a straightforward spelling
Spelling
Spelling is the writing of one or more words with letters and diacritics. In addition, the term often, but not always, means an accepted standard spelling or the process of naming the letters...
system, enabling a writer to predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation
Pronunciation
Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect....
and similarly enabling a reader to predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Ancient languages with such almost perfectly phonemic writing systems include Avestic
Avestan alphabet
The Avestan alphabet is a writing system developed during Iran's Sassanid era to render the Avestan language.As a side effect of its development, the script was also used for Pazend, a method of writing Middle Persian that was used primarily for the Zend commentaries on the texts of the Avesta...
, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Vedic
Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit is an old Indo-Aryan language. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian. It is closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved Iranian language...
, and Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
(Devanāgarī
Devanagari
Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
/Abugida
Abugida
An abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is obligatory but secondary...
, see also Vyakarana
Vyakarana
The Sanskrit grammatical tradition of ' is one of the six Vedanga disciplines. It has its roots in late Vedic India, and includes the famous work, The Sanskrit grammatical tradition of ' is one of the six Vedanga disciplines. It has its roots in late Vedic India, and includes the famous work, ...
).
On the other hand, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
have a strong difference between sounds and symbols.
The alphabetic principle does not underlie logographic writing systems
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
like Chinese or syllabic writing systems
Syllabary
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...
such as Japanese
Japanese writing system
The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:*Kanji, adopted Chinese characters*Kana, a pair of syllabaries , consisting of:...
kana
Kana
Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...
.
Latin alphabet
Most orthographies that use the Latin writing systemLatin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
are imperfectly phonological and diverge from that ideal to a greater or lesser extent. This is because the ancient Romans designed the alphabet specifically for Latin. In the Middle Ages, it was adapted to the Romance languages, the direct descendants of Latin, as well as to the Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages, and finally to most of the languages of Europe.
English orthography
English LanguageEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
is based on the alphabetic principle, but the acquisition of sounds and spellings from a variety of languages has made English spelling patterns confusing. Spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions but nearly every sound can be legitimately spelled with different letters or letter combinations. For example, the letters ee almost always represent /i/, but the sound can also be represented by the letter y.
The spelling systems for some languages, such as Spanish, are relatively simple because they adhere closely to the ideal one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them. For example, in standard Castilian Spanish
Castilian Spanish
Castilian Spanish is a term related to the Spanish language, but its exact meaning can vary even in that language. In English Castilian Spanish usually refers to the variety of European Spanish spoken in north and central Spain or as the language standard for radio and TV speakers...
the letter u always represents the sound /u/. In English
English orthography
English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetic orthographies, uses a set of habits to represent speech sounds in writing. In most other languages, these habits are regular enough so that they may be called rules...
the spelling system is more complex and varies considerably in the degree to which it follows the stated pattern. There are several reasons for this, including: first, the alphabet has 26 letters, but the English language has 40 sounds that must be reflected in word spellings; second, English spelling began to be standardized in the 15th century, and most spellings have not been revised to reflect the long-term changes in pronunciation that are typical for all languages; and third, English frequently adopts foreign words without changing the spelling of those words.
Role of the alphabetic principle in beginning reading
Decades of research has resulted in converging evidence that learning the connection between the sounds of speech and print is a critical prerequisite to effective word identification.Understanding that there is a direct relationship between letters and sounds enables a reader to retrieve the pronunciation of an unknown word and associate it with a spoken word. Printed words in a child's vocabulary can be identified by sounding them out. Understanding the relationship of letters and sounds is also the foundation of learning to spell.
Two contrastiing beliefs for teaching this aspect of beginning reading exist.
Proponents of phonics argue that this relationship needs to be taught explicitly and learned to automaticity to facilitate rapid word recognition upon which comprehension depends.
Proponents of whole language approaches argue that reading should be taught holistically, and that children naturally intuit the relationship between letters and sounds. Focus on individual letters and sounds should be taught to be used only as a last resort, and that any phonics instruction given should be embedded within a holistic approach, that is to say, through mini-lessons in the context of authentic reading and writing tasks.
See also
- PhonemePhonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
- DyslexiaDyslexiaDyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...
- Italian spelling — ItalianItalian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
is a well-known example of a language following the alphabetic principle - Phonemic orthographyPhonemic orthographyA phonemic orthography is a writing system where the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. In terms of orthographic depth, these are termed shallow orthographies, contrasting with deep orthographies...
- Phonetic spelling