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OrthographyThe orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.) Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthos (correct) and γράφειν graphein (to write). Orthography is distinct from typography. EfficiencyAn orthography may be described as efficient if it has one grapheme per phoneme (distinctive speech sound) and vice versa. An orthography may also have varying degrees of efficiency for reading or writing. For example, diverse letter, digraph, and diacritic shapes contribute to diverse word shapes, which aid fluent reading, while heavy use of apostrophes or diacritics makes writing slow, and the use of symbols not found on standard keyboards makes computer or cell phone input awkward.Phonemic orthographyA phonemic orthography is an orthography that has a dedicated symbol or sequence of symbols for each phoneme (distinctive speech sound) and vice versa, that is, graphemes and phonemes are bijective functions of one another. Spanish and Italian are very close to being phonemic, and English is among the least phonemic.Morpho-phonemic orthography A morpho-phonemic orthography considers not only what is phonemic, as above, but also the underlying structure of the words. For example, in English, /s/ and /z/ are distinct phonemes, so in a phonemic orthography the plurals of cat and dog would be cats and dogz. However, English orthography recognizes that the /s/ sound in cats and the /z/ sound in dogs are the same element (archiphoneme), automatically pronounced differently depending on its environment, and therefore writes them the same despite their differing pronunciation. German and Russian are morpho-phonemic in this sense, whereas Turkish is purely phonemic. Korean hangul has changed over the centuries from a highly phonemic to a largely morpho-phonemic orthography, and there are moves in Turkey to make that script more morpho-phonemic as well.
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