Orthography is that part of Grammar that is made of all the rules that govern the correct way of writing according to a certain language's system.
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Where and why were capital letters first used in English headlines? [migrated]
The words in headlines are capitalized. I'm interested in the history of this.
Where and why were capital letters first used in headlines? Where is this practice of capitalization of words in English ...
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Recent material (papers, books, etc) about Developmental Orthography
I have made a quick search on the internet about Developmental Orthography, but the papers and research projects I found are not very recent, some almost 20 years old. Apart from that almost all of ...
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Mostly Arabic text with some English
I was asked to help proofread an Arabic language (right-to-left) flyer with some English (left-to-right) text:
Right now it reads:
بطاقة المساعدة الغذائية
مقبولة من Local Farm Market
اسواق المزارعين ...
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diphthong vs. digraph (English)
I want to check my understanding of these 2 terms:
diphthong (concerned with sound; 1 sound; represented 2 letters; not long or short)
digraph (concerned with graphemes; 2 letters; can be long or ...
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3answers
108 views
What prevents people from pronouncing 'nowhere' as 'now + here' instead of 'no + where'?
I'm an English student (English is not my native language) and I once encountered this word nowhere, but I first recognized it in that moment as now + here and I literally pronounced it so.
Maybe my ...
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1answer
75 views
Should emoticons be considered punctuation?
Folowing on from my previous question Are "txt-speak" and "enoticons" examples of normal language evolution? I would like to propose that emoticons are simply now symbols of punctuation, rather than ...
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1answer
42 views
Do central language regulation bodies accelerate or inhibit orthography changes?
In some discussions about the latest reform of the German orthography, it was claimed that a central language regulation body prevents people from writing as they like and thus prevents »natural« ...
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135 views
How are line breaks handled in bidirectional messages containing both English and Hebrew?
I have some Hebrew (right-to-left) text within an English (left-to-right) text as such:
The Hebrew text (right-to-left) by itself looks like this:
When the paper does not have enough width, the ...
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State-of-the-art spelling correction algorithms
According to Wikipedia
The most successful algorithm to date is Andrew Golding and Dan Roth's "Winnow-based spelling correction algorithm", published in 1999, which is able to recognize about 96% ...
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Are there sentence boundary disambiguation algorithms which can handle punctuation errors with decent accuracy?
Most algorithms for splitting text into sentences which I've found rely on punctuation being correct. However, in many real world applications, there will be substantial numbers of punctuation errors ...
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Clarification on sentence case [closed]
Not sure if this is the best place to ask this question
I'm looking for clarification the use of sentence case.
The two examples are:
"Duplicate Search" vs "Duplicate search"
this is in the ...
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1answer
158 views
Capitalization of month, weekday and season names
Why in English name of months are capitalized but name of seasons do not?
Is there any languages that in its orthography seasons names are capitalized?
Is it related to the calender type used by its ...
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Where can orthographic Korean words be split at the end of a line?
Unlike Chinese and Japanese, Korean does employ spaces between words.
What constitutes a lexical word differs from what constitutes an orthographic word. For instance, particles which can is some ...
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2answers
183 views
Korean syllable-final ㅅ in Hangul transcription of loanwords
Why are English loanwords ending in /d/ or /t/ systematically transcribed into Hangul syllables ending in ㅅ rather than ㄷ? This seems strange, since when ㅅ is followed by a vowel, the coda is realised ...
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1answer
117 views
Criteria for separating Korean words
The rules for when whitespace is required/permitted in Korean are not obvious, but are not explicitly discussed in any grammars or textbooks I have access to.
I can infer this much:
Between ...
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2answers
280 views
Are “txt-speak” and “emoticons” examples of normal language evolution?
"txt-speak" appeared because of the need to fit a communication into 160 characters.
"Emoticons" appeared due to the need to convey an emotional context with your message so that it is read correctly ...
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1answer
301 views
Why don't the French pronounce consonants at the ends of words?
I am curious what could have caused the shift in pronunciation. I presume it must have occurred after the spelling of words was standardized. According to the History of French wikipedia article, this ...
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199 views
Are Written and Spoken English distinct languages?
First of all, I am not a linguist, but I was thinking the other night that being literate was almost the same as being bilingual.
My reasoning is that sign language is distinct from written and ...
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Gir15 cuneiform is esh2 homograph?
I was unable to find a cuneiform for Sumerian (Akkadian?) ĝir15 (as in ki-en-ĝir15) in the unicode character database (cuneiform namelist) .. however, according to ePSD, it seems that it has the same ...
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1answer
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Is there a term for reading a homonym that means one thing but interpreting it as another?
For example, a friend of mine posted a picture of a book series on Facebook and the start of his caption was "Read all 13!" I initially interpretted this as an imperative sentence ([ɹid] all 13), but ...
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1answer
137 views
Rules of Yale Romanization of Korean
This is kind of a specific question, though it appears there is no StackExchange forum for the Korean language...
What are the specific rules in Yale Romanization of Korean with regard to where to ...
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7answers
504 views
Is there a language whose writing is 100% phonemic?
I was wondering is there a language that has a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language?
Or rather, is there a language that is 100% ideally ...
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6answers
449 views
Which language was regularly written in the most alphabets?
There are a number of languages which have historically been written in more than one alphabet (Hindi/Urdu, Serbo-Croatian, Uzbek and so on). I am wondering which single language has been regularly ...
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117 views
For natural languages, are there writing systems that consist entirely of signs for phonemes on one hand and grammatical morphemes on the other?
At omniglot.com, we find scripts whose characters more-or-less stand for consonant phonemes, or all phonemes, or syllables, or words. But I've never heard of a language whose written form consists ...
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So many Romanian words seem to end in “u”
I have just learned that the suffix "escu" in a Romanian name means "son of." But it seems that the "u" is a common ending in all Romanian words. Does that one letter have a meaning?
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Same sounds spelled more than one way
Why are there multiple ways for expressing the same sound?
In English, for example, you can say "axe" or "aks," or when "c" sounds like "s" like in "face."
This phenomenon exists in many different ...
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1answer
207 views
How can I distinguish Dutch from Flemish from Afrikaans at a glance?
I don't know Dutch, Flemish, or Afrikaans, but will sometimes, on coming across a writing sample of one of them, wish to know which it is. How do I distinguish them in their written forms?
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174 views
How can I distinguish modern Scandinavian languages at a glance?
I don't know Danish, Nynorsk, or Bokmål, but will sometimes, on coming across a writing sample of one of them, wish to know which it is. How do I distinguish them in their written forms?
(I'd include ...
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2answers
237 views
What is this phenomenon called, and is it the only occurrence?
Usually it's fairly easy to know the spelling of words in italian, given the very close relation between that and pronunciation.
But that's not always true. The word musulmano in italian (which means ...
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1answer
139 views
How are line breaks handled in ideographic scripts?
I'm particularly thinking of a situation where multiple characters form a compound. Can such compounds be broken up over two lines?
Examples I can think of as potentially problematic are ...
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4answers
452 views
Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken?
What's the difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken? According to my understanding, agglutinative languages typically join prefixes and suffixes extensively.
For ...
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208 views
Can you measure the rate of drift?
Is there a measure for the rate of language drift? In one answer to this question, it was suggested that drift had slowed for technological reasons, but may also be speeding up because of different ...
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2answers
210 views
Is there any point in the current ordering of the letters in the alphabet?
I know we inherit our alphabets (including its ordering) from the Romans, and if we trace it further we will end up with the Phoenicians or some other civilizations in the ancient Middle East. Do (or ...
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2answers
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Is there an active alphabetic writing system not based on the Phoenician or the Brahmic lineage?
The vast majority of alphabetic writing systems are part of the Phoenician lineage (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic and friends) or Brahmic (Devanagari and friends). Is there an active alphabetic system outside ...
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1answer
136 views
Are there different terms for when a language has two ways to spell a sound vs. two ways to pronounce a spelling?
In languages that don't have a perfect 1:1 mapping between sounds and letters in their written form there are two possibilities.
In English "bow" and "bough" are two spellings with a single ...
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176 views
How could the Sumerian cuneiform impose constraints on some languages?
It is said that the adoption of Sumerian cuneiform by Akkadian and other languages in the Middle East imposed constraints on those languages (due to the limited number of sounds represented in ...
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261 views
Does capitalization of nouns aid reading comprehension?
German is the only widely used language prescribing capitalization of nouns in the written language. I speak English and German fluently myself, but I can read German texts significantly faster than ...
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397 views
How do we perceive and read words and sentences? Does the order of the inner letters play no significant role?
Try to read this texts, start with the most difficult one, if you cant read, skip to the next easier one:
all letters mixed
I onlucd't ieebvel ttah I udloc talyulac rsddetanun hwat I swa
...
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2answers
592 views
How did Italian manage to stay (mostly) phonetically spelled despite its long written tradition?
Italian is commonly cited as an example of a phonetically spelled language. It is easy to guess how an Italian word is pronounced based on the way it is written, because each written symbol highly ...
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3answers
279 views
What's the term for correspondence between the written and the spoken form of a language?
Not all languages have the same degree of correspondence between the spoken and the written form.
Saying correspondence, I'm referring to the equivalence between what we write in a certain language ...
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4answers
322 views
In Turkish, how exactly does “ğ” affect the vowel it follows?
In Standard Turkish, "ğ" is explained as having no sound of its own but instead lengthens the previous vowel.
So would "aa" and "ağ" sound alike? What about "â" and "ağa"? Can there sometimes be ...
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Do all non-syllabic, non-logographic scripts have pronounceable names for their letters for spelling?
If you ask an English speaker to spell a word, there are specific, widely-known names for all the letters to fill this need. The same appears to be true for all Phoenician-derived alphabets that I can ...
