Heterography and homography

In linguistics, heterography is a property of a written language, such that it lacks a 1-to-1 correspondence between the written symbols and the sounds of the spoken language.[1] Its opposite is homography, which is the property of a language such that written symbols of its written form and the sounds of its spoken form have a 1-to-1 correspondence.[2]

The orthography of the English language is, according to Larry Trask, a "spectacular example" of heterography. But most European languages exhibit it to some extent. Finnish is "very close" to being a systematically homographic language.[1][2] A phonemic transcription (such as a transcription of phonemes that uses the International Phonetic Alphabet, for example) is, by its nature, homographic, also.[2]

The degree of heterography of a language is a factor in how difficult it is for person to learn to read that language, with highly heterographic orthographies being more difficult to learn than more homographic ones. Many people have espoused the point of view that the extreme heterographic nature of English is a disadvantage in several respects. These include, for example, Dr. Kiyoshi Makita writing in the July 1968 issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, who attributes the rarity of dyslexia amongst Japanese children to the fact that Japanese is a highly homographic language.[3][4]

Types
Key to terminology
Written forms
same different
Sounds same Homophonic homographs Homophonic heterographs
different Heterophonic homographs Heterophonic heterographs

Confusion between heterographic homophonic words (homophonic heterographs or heterographic homophones) such as "piece" and "peace" is one of the symptoms of surface dyslexia, a form of dyslexia causing error when a word's spelling is not perceived to be in accord with pronunciation rules.[5]

Other homophonic heterographs in English include:

In French, examples include "sain" and "saint".[7]

Heterographs are especially problematic for written communication, in that spelling errors (e.g., in a word-processed or emailed document) due to the typist choosing the wrong member of a heterograph set will persist into the final document, even after spell-checking. This is because heterographs cannot be caught by a simple spell checker, which only inspects the word itself (i.e., which is correct in some contexts) and not the context it is in (which may indicate the need for a different spelling).

Heterophonic homographs (also known as homographic heterophones) are, in contrast, words whose spoken sounds differ but whose written forms are the same. English has a few hundred heterophonic homographs,[8] examples of these latter include "lead" ("lead by example" vs "lead poisoning") and "read" ("will read" vs "has read").[6][8]

The two aforementioned classes of words, along with a third class (homophonic homographs—words with different meanings whose written and spoken forms are both the same, such as "bank" in English and "杜鹃" in Chinese) are the three classes of lexical ambiguities in all languages (marked in green in the key on the right).[9] "Heterophonic heterographs" (marked in brown) are words spelled differently and pronounced differently, consisting of all words outside of the other three classes.

In other languages

Chinese

Chinese has many words that are both homophonic and homotonic (meaning that the homophone pair shares the same phonemic tones).

See also: Mandarin tones

Distinctions are made between such words using heterography.[10] For example, the homophones with the pronunciation qīngdàn, 清淡 and 氢弹, sound indistinguishable from each other, but they are written using different Chinese characters, as seen in this sentence. The words mean "faint (light)" and "hydrogen bomb" respectively.[11] Homophonic heterographs are very frequent in Chinese, whereas heterophonic homographs are not.[9]

In contrast, homographic heterophony is one of the most salient characteristics of English orthography, with the "-ough" in "though", "tough", "through", "thought", "bough", "cough", and "dough" being homographic but greatly heterophonic.[12]

In some cases, additional new Chinese characters were created for already existing words to convey information that would have previously been missing, particularly in the case of pronouns. For example, the Standard Chinese singular third-person pronoun, tā, was originally written only as 它. As Standard Chinese lacked grammatical gender, this pronoun was used to represent the English equivalents of "he", "she", and "it". However, in 1870, the masculine and feminine versions of the pronoun, 他 and 她 respectively, were introduced as a result of increased contact with native English speakers, in which English has a masculine, feminine, and neuter form of the singular first person pronoun as shown in the previous sentence.[13] There is even a singular third-person pronoun for animals, 牠, and one used for spirits or deities, 祂, which is typically used exclusively in religious literature, i.e. Chinese Christian hymns. While these pronouns are distinguished in writing, they are indistinguishable in spoken contexts. For this reason, the necessity of having multiple characters to represent the singular third-person pronoun has been a subject of debate among native Chinese speakers even to this day. In recent years, it has been more common to write the singular third-person pronoun simply using pinyin romanization instead of a Chinese character, tā or ta, in contexts where the subject's gender is unknown,[14] similar to using "he/she" or singular they in English-speaking contexts.

Likewise, while the singular third-person pronoun, nĭ, is usually written as 你, it is sometimes written as 妳 when referring to a female love interest or 祢 when referring to a deity.

French

Although written French includes a limited number of heterophonous homographs – for example, est (/ɛ/, "is") v. est (/ɛst/, "east") and fils (/fis/, "son") v. fils (/fil/, "threads") – it has many homophonous heterographs – for example, vert ("green"), vers ("towards"), verre ("glass"), ver ("worm"), vair ("a type of fur"), all pronounced /vɛʁ/.

There is thus a strong correlation in French between spelling and pronunciation, but only in one direction: From the spelling of an unknown word one can in almost every case know, or very reliably guess at, its correct pronunciation, but the spelling of a previously unknown word is not easily deducible from its pronunciation.

English, by contrast, exhibits a weak correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in both directions, making it a much more heterographic language than French.

See also

References
  1. Robert Lawrence Trask (1996). "heterography". A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. Routledge. p. 170. ISBN 9780415112611.
  2. Robert Lawrence Trask (1996). "homography". A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. Routledge. p. 172. ISBN 9780415112611.
  3. Makita K (July 1968). "The rarity of reading disability in Japanese children". Am J Orthopsychiatry. 38: 599–614. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1968.tb02428.x. PMID 5661541.
  4. Vijay Pratap Singh (2004). "The Poor Speller and Reader". Concept and Methods of Special Education. Sarup & Sons. p. 261. ISBN 81-7625-450-9.
  5. J. Carolina Iribarren (2007). "Description and Detection of Acquired Dyslexia and Disgraphia in Spanish". In José G. Centeno; Raquel Teresa Anderson; Loraine K. Obler (eds.). Communication Disorders in Spanish Speakers. Multilingual Matters. pp. 235. ISBN 9781853599712.
  6. Rhona Stainthorp & Diana Hughes (1999). Learning from Children who Read at an Early Age. Taylor & Francis. p. 9. ISBN 9780415174954.
  7. Jean-Pierre Jaffré and Michel Fayol (2006). "Orthography and literacy in French". In R. Malatesha Joshi; P. G. Aaron (eds.). Handbook of Orthography and Literacy. Routledge. p. 85. ISBN 9780805854671.
  8. John Higgins. "Homographs". Retrieved 2009-12-01.
  9. Ping Li (2006). The handbook of East Asian psycholinguistics. Cambridge University Press. pp. 273. ISBN 9780521833332.
  10. Po-ching Yip (2000). The Chinese Lexicon. Routledge. p. 16. ISBN 9780415151740.
  11. "Chinese Language / Useful Notes". TV Tropes. Retrieved 2020-12-30.
  12. Jean-Pierre Changeux & Jean Chavaillon (1995). Origins of the Human Brain. Oxford University Press. p. 225. ISBN 9780198523901.
  13. ""她"字的文化史—女性新代词的发明与认同研究". Harvard-Yenching Institute. Retrieved 2020-12-30.
  14. Mair, Victor (2013-12-26). "A Gender-Neutral Pronoun (Re)emerges in China". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2020-12-31.

Further reading
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