English orthography

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INTRODUCTION
Warren (2007), describes English orthography as "In English words, graph means write; get means carth; phone means sound”. Full definition of orthography, it is the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage. In linguistics the term orthography is often used to refer to any method of writing a language, without judgment as to right and wrong, with s scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a range of strength of convection. The original sense of the word, though, implies a dichotomy of correct and incorrect, and the word is still most often used to refer specifically to a thoroughly standardized, prescriptively correct, way of writing a language.
Orthography is a system for representing a language in written form. It encompasses more than the symbols that represent the sound (often called characters, letters or graphemes).Orthography also covers relative placement of these symbols word breaks, punctuation, diacritics, capitalization, hyphenation and other aspects which might be regulated in a written standard.
According to O'Grady,et al.(1989).English orthography is the set of convections for representing language in written form. In this section, we will consider the nature of English orthography.
According to Muhammad,(2014:6),when students learn a second or foreign language, they face some overlaps because of the very different phoneme systems of both languages.So,when they try to speak a second language they produce the sounds which are closest to the sounds that are existed in their mother tongue. For example, most Sudanese speakers pronounce the word park and cheap as bark and sheep. This kind of pronunciation problem creates a big hindrance in the process of communication among the speakers.
Scholars in the field of teaching have stated that English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetical orthographies, exhibits a set of relationships between speech sounds and the corresponding written words. In Standard English spelling, however, nearly every sound can be spelled in more than one way, and most spelling and all letters can be pronounced in more one way and often in many different ways. This is largely due to the complex history of the English language, together with the absence of systematic reforms implemented in contrast to the position in a number of the other languages. Some of the problems have been noticed that learners of English as a foreign language, especially in Sudanese universities have problems with pronunciation and spelling when using English. So orthographic system is either ignored or mistaken in those productive skills .Therefore, this reflects negatively on learners' on written and spoken skills.
If indeed the origin of the alphabet writing system were based on a correspondence between single symbol and single sound type, then one might reasonably ask why there is such a frequent mismatch between the forms of written English and the sounds of spoken English. The spelling of written English was very largely fixed in the form that was used when printing was introduced in fifteenth century England. Since the fifteenth century, the pronunciation of spoken English has undergone substantial changes. Yule,(1996.)
Yule,(2010).English orthography or spelling of contemporary English allow for a lot of variation in how each sound is represented .The vowel sound represented by /i/ is written in various ways, as shown
                    i (critique)
                    ie (belief)
                    ei (receipt)
                    ea (meat)
                    ee (queen)
                    eo (people)
And the consonant sound represented by /s/ had various spelling,
                    s(sugar)
                    ss (tissue)
                    ssi (mission).
Part of the reason for this is that the English language is full of words borrowed, often with their spelling, from other language, as in "ph"for /f/ in the Greek borrowing alphabet and orthography.
An irregularity a frequently expressed complaint about English orthography is that it does not establish a one to one relationship between symbols and sounds. The following excerpt from a some problems with English orthography
   Some letters do not represented any sound in a particular word. Example through, sign, give, palm.
   A group of two or more letters can be used together to represent a single sound.Example, think, chip, ship.
  A single letter can represent a cluster of two or more sounds. Example, saxophone /ks/,exile/gz/.
  The same letter can represent different sound in different words. Example, on/a/,bone/ow/.
  The same sound can be represented by different letter in different words. Example, rude, loop,soup,new,see,to,two/uw



References
Muhammad,E.I.(2014)Pronunciation problems:A case study of English language students of                              Sudan University of Science and Technology.Riyadh:English Language                                         Department,Al-Farubi private college.
O'Grady,W.et al.(1989).Contemporary Linguistics:An introduction.New York:St Marthin's Press.
Warren,C.(2007).Orthography:Comprising phonics work and spelling.Harvard:Kessinger                          Publishing.
Yule,G.(1996).The study of language (2nd Ed).Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Yule,G.(2010).The study of language (4th Ed).Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.


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