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Defective script

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In <a href="Graphemics" title="Graphemics">graphemics</a>, a defective script is a <a href="Writing_system" title="Writing system">writing system</a> that does not represent all the <a href="Phoneme" title="Phoneme">phonemic</a> distinctions of a language.<a href="#cite_note-Sampson-1">[1]</a>: 36–38 <a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a>: 118 This means that the concept is always relative to a given language. Taking the <a href="Latin_alphabet" title="Latin alphabet">Latin alphabet</a> used in <a href="Italian_orthography" title="Italian orthography">Italian orthography</a> as an example, the <a href="Italian_language" title="Italian language">Italian language</a> has seven <a href="Vowel" title="Vowel">vowels</a>, but the alphabet has only five vowel <a href="Letter_(alphabet)" title="Letter (alphabet)">letters</a> to represent them; in general, the difference between the phonemes <a href="Vowel#Height" title="Vowel">close</a> /e, o/ and <a href="Vowel#Height" title="Vowel">open</a> /ɛ, ɔ/ is simply ignored, though stress marks, if used, may distinguish them. Among the Italian <a href="Consonant" title="Consonant">consonants</a>, both /s/ and /z/ are written ⟨s⟩, and both /t͡s/ and /d͡z/ are written ⟨z⟩; <a href="Stress_(linguistics)" title="Stress (linguistics)">stress</a> and <a href="Hiatus_(linguistics)" class="mw-redirect" title="Hiatus (linguistics)">hiatus</a> are also not reliably distinguished.<a href="#cite_note-3">[3]</a>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="Ancient_examples_of_defective_script">Ancient examples of defective script</h2></div>

Such shortcomings are not uncommon. The <a href="Greek_alphabet" title="Greek alphabet">Greek alphabet</a> was defective during its early history. <a href="Ancient_Greek_language" class="mw-redirect" title="Ancient Greek language">Ancient Greek</a> had distinctive <a href="Vowel_length" title="Vowel length">vowel length</a>: five short vowels, /i e a o u/, and seven long vowels, /iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː/. When the <a href="Phoenician_alphabet" title="Phoenician alphabet">Phoenician alphabet</a> was adapted to Greek, the names of five letters were pronounced by the Greeks with initial consonants made silent, and were then used <a href="Acrophony" title="Acrophony">acrophonically</a> to represent vowels. These were <a href="Alpha_(letter)" class="mw-redirect" title="Alpha (letter)">alpha</a>, e (later called <a href="Epsilon" title="Epsilon">e psilon</a>), <a href="Iota_(letter)" class="mw-redirect" title="Iota (letter)">iota</a>, o (later called <a href="Omicron_(letter)" class="mw-redirect" title="Omicron (letter)">o micron</a>), and u (later called <a href="Upsilon_(letter)" class="mw-redirect" title="Upsilon (letter)">u psilon</a>) – <α, ε, ι, ο, υ> – five letters for twelve vowel sounds. (The lost initial consonants were /ʔ, h, j, ʕ, w/.) Later the [h] (from /ħ/) dropped out from the Eastern Greek dialects, and the letter heta (now pronounced <a href="Eta_(letter)" class="mw-redirect" title="Eta (letter)">eta</a>) became available; it was used for /ɛː/. About the same time, the Greeks created an additional letter, <a href="Omega_(letter)" class="mw-redirect" title="Omega (letter)">o mega</a>, probably by writing o micron with an underline, that was used for /ɔː/. <a href="Digraph_(orthography)" title="Digraph (orthography)">Digraphs</a> <ει> and <ου>, no longer pronounced as <a href="Diphthong" title="Diphthong">diphthongs</a> /ej/ and /ow/, were adopted for /eː/ and /oː/. Thus, Greek entered its classical era with seven letters and two digraphs – <α, ε, ι, ο, υ, η, ω, ει, ου> – for twelve vowel sounds. Long /iː aː uː/ were never distinguished from short /i a u/, even though the distinction was meaningful. Although the Greek alphabet was a good match to the consonants of the language, it was defective when it came to some vowels.<a href="#cite_note-4">[4]</a><a href="#cite_note-5">[5]</a>

Other ancient scripts were also defective. Egyptian <a href="Hieroglyphs" class="mw-redirect" title="Hieroglyphs">hieroglyphs</a> had no vowel representation at all, while the <a href="Cuneiform_script" class="mw-redirect" title="Cuneiform script">cuneiform script</a> frequently did not distinguish among a consonant triad like /t/, /d/ and /t'/ (emphatic /t/), or between the vowels /e/ and /i/.

With only 16 characters, the <a href="Younger_Futhark" title="Younger Futhark">Younger Futhark</a> was an even more defective form of the <a href="Elder_Futhark" title="Elder Futhark">Elder Futhark</a>, from which it had evolved by the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries. At the same time, phonetic changes that led to a greater number of different phonemes in the spoken language, when <a href="Proto-Norse" class="mw-redirect" title="Proto-Norse">Proto-Norse</a> evolved into <a href="Old_Norse" title="Old Norse">Old Norse</a>. As an example, the Younger Futhark no longer had separate signs for <a href="Voiced_stop" class="mw-redirect" title="Voiced stop">voiced stops</a> and <a href="Voiceless_stop" class="mw-redirect" title="Voiceless stop">voiceless stops</a>, so a rune like <a href="Tiwaz_(rune)" title="Tiwaz (rune)">Týr (ᛏ)</a> could represent all of /d/, /t/, /nd/ or /nt/.

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="Modern_examples_of_defective_script">Modern examples of defective script</h2></div>

Languages with a long literary history have a tendency to freeze spelling at an early stage, leaving subsequent pronunciation shifts unrecorded. Such is the case with English, French, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai, among others. By contrast, some writing systems have been periodically respelled in accordance with changed pronunciation, such as Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Irish, and Japanese hiragana. Note that all of these languages indeed have long literary histories but have simply evolved where others did not.

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading3"><h3 id="Non-Latin_scripts">Non-Latin scripts</h3></div>

A broadly defective script is the <a href="Arabic_abjad" class="mw-redirect" title="Arabic abjad">Arabic abjad</a>.<a href="#cite_note-DB-6">[6]</a>: 561–3 The modern script does not normally write short vowels or <a href="Gemination" title="Gemination">geminate</a> (double) consonants, and for the first few centuries of the <a href="Islam" title="Islam">Islamic</a> era, long ā was also not consistently written and many consonant letters were ambiguous as well. The Arabic script derives from the Aramaic, and not only did the <a href="Aramaic_language" class="mw-redirect" title="Aramaic language">Aramaic language</a> have fewer <a href="Phoneme" title="Phoneme">phonemes</a> than Arabic, but several originally distinct Aramaic letters had conflated (become indistinguishable in shape), so that in the early Arabic writings, 28 consonant phonemes were represented by only 18 letters—and in the middle of words, only 15 were distinct. For example, medial ⟨ـٮـ⟩ represented /b, t, θ, n, j/, and ⟨ح⟩ represented /d͡ʒ, ħ, x/. A system of <a href="Diacritic" title="Diacritic">diacritic</a> marks, or pointing, was later developed to resolve the ambiguities, and over the centuries became nearly universal. However, even today, unpointed texts of a style called mašq are found, wherein these consonants are not distinguished.<a href="#cite_note-7">[7]</a>

Without short vowels or geminate consonants being written, modern Arabic script نظر nẓr could represent نَظَرَ /naðˤara/ 'he saw', نَظَّرَ /naðˤːara/ 'he compared', نُظِرَ /nuðˤira/ 'he was seen', نُظِّرَ /nuðˤːira/ 'he was compared', نَظَر /naðˤar/ 'a glance', or نِظْر /niðˤr/ 'similar'. However, in practice there is little ambiguity, as the vowels are more easily predictable in Arabic than they are in a language like English. Moreover, the defective nature of the script has its benefits: the stable shape of the root words, despite grammatical <a href="Inflection" title="Inflection">inflection</a>, results in quicker word recognition and therefore faster reading speeds; and the lack of short vowels, the sounds which vary the most between <a href="Varieties_of_Arabic" title="Varieties of Arabic">Arabic dialects</a>, makes texts more widely accessible to a diverse audience.<a href="#cite_note-8">[8]</a> Non-native speakers learning Arabic or Persian, however, do suffer difficulties in acquiring correct pronunciation from undermarked pedagogical material.

Further, in mašq and those styles of <a href="Kufic" title="Kufic">kufic</a> writing which lack consonant pointing, the ambiguities are more serious, for here different roots are written the same. ٮطر could represent the root nẓr 'see' as above, but also nṭr 'protect', bṭr 'pride', bẓr 'clitoris' or 'with flint', as well as several inflections and derivations of each of these root words.

The Arabic alphabet has been adopted by many Muslim peoples to write their languages. In them, new consonant letters have been devised for sounds lacking in Arabic (e.g. /p/, /g/, /t͡ʃ/, and /ʒ/ in <a href="Persian_language" title="Persian language">Persian</a>;<a href="#cite_note-DB-6">[6]</a>: 747 and all the aspirate and retroflex stops in <a href="Sindhi_language" title="Sindhi language">Sindhi</a><a href="#cite_note-DB-6">[6]</a>: 757 ). But rarely have the full set of vowels been represented in those new alphabets: <a href="Ottoman_Turkish_language" class="mw-redirect" title="Ottoman Turkish language">Ottoman Turkish</a> had eight vowels, but used only three letters to notate them.<a href="#cite_note-DB-6">[6]</a>: 758 However, some adaptions of the Arabic alphabet do unambiguously and compulsorily mark all vowels: among them, those for <a href="Arebica" title="Arebica">Bosnian</a>, <a href="Kashmiri_language" title="Kashmiri language">Kashmiri</a>,<a href="#cite_note-DB-6">[6]</a>: 753 <a href="Kyrgyz_alphabets" title="Kyrgyz alphabets">Kyrgyz</a>, <a href="Xiao'erjing" title="Xiao'erjing">Mandarin</a>, <a href="Kurdish_alphabets#Sorani_alphabet" title="Kurdish alphabets">Sorani</a>, and <a href="Uyghur_Arabic_alphabet" title="Uyghur Arabic alphabet">Uyghur</a>.<a href="#cite_note-DB-6">[6]</a>: 748

When a defective script is written with diacritics or other conventions to indicate all phonemic distinctions, the result is called plene writing.<a href="#cite_note-9">[9]</a>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading3"><h3 id="Latin_script">Latin script</h3></div>

Some otherwise <a href="Phonemic_orthography" title="Phonemic orthography">phonemic orthographies</a> based on the <a href="Latin_script" title="Latin script">Latin script</a> are slightly defective:

<ul><li><a href="Malay_alphabet" class="mw-redirect" title="Malay alphabet">Malay</a> (incl. <a href="Malaysian_language" class="mw-redirect" title="Malaysian language">Malaysian</a> and <a href="Indonesian_language" title="Indonesian language">Indonesian</a> where /e/ and /ə/ are written as <e>).</li>

<li><a href="Italian_alphabet" class="mw-redirect" title="Italian alphabet">Italian</a> does not distinguish open-mid and close-mid vowels in stressed syllables; /s/ and /z/; /ts/ and /dz/.</li>

<li><a href="Maltese_alphabet" title="Maltese alphabet">Maltese</a> and <a href="Welsh_orthography" title="Welsh orthography">Welsh</a> do not distinguish most vowel length.</li>

<li><a href="Kazakh_alphabets" title="Kazakh alphabets">Kazakh</a></li>

<li><a href="Lithuanian_language" title="Lithuanian language">Lithuanian</a> and <a href="Serbo-Croatian#Writing_systems" title="Serbo-Croatian">Serbo-Croatian</a> do not distinguish <a href="Pitch_accent" class="mw-redirect" title="Pitch accent">tone and vowel length</a> (also additional vowels for Lithuanian).</li>

<li><a href="Latvian_language" title="Latvian language">Latvian</a> does not distinguish tone and some of its vowels.</li>

<li><a href="Somali_alphabet" class="mw-redirect" title="Somali alphabet">Somali</a> does not distinguish vowel <a href="Phonation" title="Phonation">phonation</a> and tone.</li></ul>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="Stenography_systems">Stenography systems</h2></div>

<a href="Shorthand" title="Shorthand">Stenography</a> systems are normally defective writing systems, leaving away redundant information for the sake of writing speed. <a href="Pitman_shorthand" title="Pitman shorthand">Pitman shorthand</a>, for instance, can be written while distinguishing only three vowel symbolizations for the first vowel of a word (high vowel, mid vowel, or low vowel), though there are optional diacritical methods for distinguishing more vowel qualities. <a href="Taylor_shorthand" title="Taylor shorthand">Taylor shorthand</a>, which was widely used in the first half of the 19th century, does not distinguish any vowels at all – there is just a dot when a word begins or ends with any vowel.

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="Considerations">Considerations</h2></div>

Defectiveness is a <a href="Cline_(linguistics)" class="mw-redirect" title="Cline (linguistics)">cline</a>: the Semitic <a href="Abjad" title="Abjad">abjads</a> do not indicate all vowels, but there are also alphabets which mark vowels but not <a href="Tone_(linguistics)" title="Tone (linguistics)">tone</a> (e.g. many <a href="Writing_systems_of_Africa" title="Writing systems of Africa">African languages</a>), or vowel quality but not vowel length (e.g. <a href="Latin_spelling_and_pronunciation" class="mw-redirect" title="Latin spelling and pronunciation">Latin</a>). Even if English orthography were regularized, the English alphabet would still be incapable of unambiguously conveying <a href="Intonation_(linguistics)" title="Intonation (linguistics)">intonation</a>; since this is not expected of scripts, it is not normally counted as defectiveness.<a href="#cite_note-Sampson-1">[1]</a>

<ul><li><a href="Phonemic_orthography" title="Phonemic orthography">Phonemic orthography</a> – Orthography in which there is an exact one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes and the phonemes of the language</li></ul>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="References">References</h2></div>

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</style><cite id="CITEREFSampson1985" class="citation book cs1">Sampson, Geoffrey (1985). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/writingsystems00geof">Writing Systems</a>. Stanford University Press. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0-8047-1756-4</bdi>.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-2"><a href="#cite_ref-2">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFCoulmas1996" class="citation book cs1">Coulmas, Florian (1996). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Blackwell. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0-631-21481-6</bdi>.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-3"><a href="#cite_ref-3">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFDanesi1996" class="citation book cs1">Danesi, Marcel (1996). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/italianeasyway00dane_0">Italian the Easy way</a>. Barron's Educational Series. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>9780812091465</bdi>.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-4"><a href="#cite_ref-4">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFPierre_Swiggers1996" class="citation book cs1">Pierre Swiggers (1996). "Transmission of the Phoenician Script to the West". In P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (ed.). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780195079937">The World's Writing Systems</a>. Oxford University Press. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0-19-507993-7</bdi>.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-5"><a href="#cite_ref-5">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFLeslie_Threatte1996" class="citation book cs1">Leslie Threatte (1996). "The Greek Alphabet". In P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (ed.). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780195079937">The World's Writing Systems</a>. Oxford University Press. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0-19-507993-7</bdi>.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-DB-6">^ <a href="#cite_ref-DB_6-0">a</a> <a href="#cite_ref-DB_6-1">b</a> <a href="#cite_ref-DB_6-2">c</a> <a href="#cite_ref-DB_6-3">d</a> <a href="#cite_ref-DB_6-4">e</a> <a href="#cite_ref-DB_6-5">f</a> <cite id="CITEREFPeter_T._DanielsWilliam_Bright1996" class="citation book cs1">Peter T. Daniels; William Bright (1996). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780195079937">The World's Writing Systems</a>. Oxford University Press. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0-19-507993-7</bdi>.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-7"><a href="#cite_ref-7">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFRichard_BellWilliam_Montgomery_Watt1970" class="citation book cs1">Richard Bell; William Montgomery Watt (1970). Bell's Introduction to the Qur'ān. Edinburgh: University Press. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0-85224-171-4</bdi>.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-8"><a href="#cite_ref-8">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFThomas_Bauer1996" class="citation book cs1">Thomas Bauer (1996). "Arabic Writing". In P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (ed.). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780195079937">The World's Writing Systems</a>. Oxford University Press. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0-19-507993-7</bdi>.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-9"><a href="#cite_ref-9">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFWerner_Weinberg1985" class="citation book cs1">Werner Weinberg (1985). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/historyofhebrewp0000wein">The History of Hebrew Plene Spelling</a>. Hebrew Union College Press. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0-87820-205-8</bdi>.</cite>

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</ol></div></div></div><div><div class="zim-footer">

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