English Orthography - the Writing System

The written form of communication is perhaps the most problematic area of language learning for non-native English speakers.

The English Writing System

The word ‘orthography’ refers to the rules for writing a language, such as conventions of spelling and punctuation. In an alphabetic script, such as English, this definition also includes its grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) correspondences.

English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography uses a set of rules that governs how speech is represented in writing. English has relatively complicated spelling rules because of the complex history of the English language. Most sounds in English can be spelled in more than one way and many spellings can be pronounced in more than one way.

English contains 24 to 27 (depending on dialect) separate consonant phonemes and between fourteen to twenty vowels and diphthongs. However, English only uses the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet. For this reason, a one to one correspondence between character and sound is not possible to denote all the complex sounds. This means that the letters have to multi-task!

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Phonemic representation

The letters in English orthography represent a particular sound. Single letters or multiple sequences of letters may provide indication of other sounds, such as ‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘th’ or ‘ph’. Thus, the single letter ‘d’ in the word ‘dog’ represents a single sound, whereas in the word ‘shout’), we use the digraph (two letters) ‘sh’. We also sometimes use three letters to make a sound, such as in the word ‘scotch’, the three letters ‘tch’ indicate the correct pronunciation. Sometimes four letters can also make a common sound, such as ‘sion’ or ‘tion’ as in ‘television’ and ‘attention’.

The same letters may indicate different sounds. For example, the digraph ‘ch’ represents the first syllable in ‘church’ and ‘cheese’, but when used in the words ‘character’ and ‘chorus’ the ‘ch’ diagraph is pronounced differently (a hard ‘c’ or ‘k’ sound), to rhyme with ‘court’.Other examples include ‘ph’ sounding like ‘f’ (e.g. the diagraph ‘ph’ in ‘telephone’ and ‘graph’ perform the same function as the ‘f’ in ‘golf’ and ‘beef’ and ‘yourself’). The use of these alternative, more complex spellings for these sounds often mean that the words have been borrowed from Greek.

Often the pronunciation of a set of letters is dependent on where the letters occur within a word. For example, in the words ‘laugh’ and ‘cough’, the diagraph ‘gh’ is pronounced like an ‘f’, because it is at the end of the word. However, when used in the words ‘Ghana’, ‘ghetto’ or ‘ghost’, the diagraph ‘gh’ rhymes with the ‘g’ in ‘garden’, (a hard ‘g’) because it is used at the start of the word.

The diagraph ‘gh’ can be used in many circumstances with different pronunciations, however, such as in the words ‘high’, ‘through’ and ’borough’. The last two words here are part of the notorious ‘ough’ letter combination.

Ough Words

The English language has quite a weak connection between the written form of a word and the spoken form of that word. For example, the letter combination 'ough' can be pronounced in many different ways depending on the rest of the letters surrounding it. The the words 'bough', 'trough', through', thorough', 'enough' all contain the letters 'ough' yet have a different pronunciation. This can seem very confusing and illogical to ESL learners!

Ough words

§ though: /oʊ/ as in toe;

§ tough: /ʌf/ as in cuff;

§ cough: /ɒf/ as in off;

§ plough: /aʊ/ as in cow;

§ through: /uː/ as in threw;

§ nought: /ɔː/ as in caught;

§ thorough: /ə/ as in about or mother (British English);

§ hiccough (a now uncommon variant of hiccup): /ʌp/ as in up.

The letter 'x'

Rarely, a single letter is used to represent multiple sounds. A useful example of this is the letter ‘x’, which normally represents the two letters ‘ks’ when sounded together, for example the word ‘expect’.

The letter ‘y’

When representing a vowel, the letter ‘y’ in final positions represents the sound ‘ee’ in words which have been borrowed from Greek. However, the letter ‘i’ is usually used to represent this sound when used in non-Greek words. Thus, the word myth is of Greek origin, while pith is a Germanic word. Both words rhyme and the ‘y’ and the ‘i’ perform the same function. It is their origin which alters the representation of the sound in written English.

Homophone differentiation

Spelling may also be used to distinguish between homophones (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings). For example, the words hour and our are pronounced identically in some accents. However, they are distinguished from each other orthographically by the addition of the letter ‘h’. Another example is the pair of homophones plain and plane, where both are pronounced the same but their difference in meaning is marked by their different orthographic representations.

This difference is not always in spelling and you will have to work it out from the context. For example the word ‘bare’ means unadorned or with no clothes on. However the word ‘bear’, sounding identical to ‘bare’ can mean the big grizzly animal or the verb ‘to bear’ meaning ‘to endure’ or ‘to carry’.

Another example of unresolved homophones in writing is the word ‘bay’ which has many meanings (i.e. a recess, a parking space, a kind of herb, a wide inlet of sea, a noise from an animal, a kind of tree and a colour).

Silent letters

There are many spellings which do not look at all like they sound. There are functionless letters, such as the ‘b’ in ‘debt’ (from Latin 'debitum') the 's' in 'island' (from the Latin insula instead of the more useful Norse igland).

Some letters have no linguistic function. The letter ‘e’ is soundless at the end of most English words. (For example, ‘give’, ‘have’, ‘grave’) This is especially common with words ending in ‘ve’ where the final sound is the ‘v’ not the ‘e’. When an ‘e’ is sounded it usually denotes that the word is of foreign extraction, for example when using an accent on words such as ‘cafe’.

Multiple functionality

The letter ‘c’ is usually pronounced like ‘car’, cash’, ‘crazy’ (a hard ‘c’), but when used before the vowel ‘i’ is changes to sound like an ‘s’. This can be seen in the words ‘circle’, ‘cinema’, ‘cider’, ‘circus’, cigarette’ and ‘city’.

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