Orthography is a term that refers to the conventions and rules of written language. The three orthographic features in English are spelling, punctuation, and capitalisation.
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Jetzt kostenlos anmeldenOrthography is a term that refers to the conventions and rules of written language. The three orthographic features in English are spelling, punctuation, and capitalisation.
If we look at the etymology of the word orthography we can see how it relates to its definition. The word orthography can be broken down into two Ancient Greek words, roughly translating 'to write correctly':
Ὀρθός “orthos” (correct)
γράφειν “graphein” (to write).
Orthographic features are the standard grammatical rules that are followed when writing a language down. The technicalities of the orthographic features of a language depend on the writing system used by the language.
Take road signs, for example. While they are not a language, they can be almost universally understood as they use symbols to communicate general ideas rather than specific meanings. With this understanding of them in mind, it is clear that they don't require certain orthographic features.
Orthography is important as it helps the reader to understand the text and makes the text more appealing to read.
The orthographic features of the English language encompass the spelling, punctuation and capitalization of letters within writing, which the next few paragraphs will expand on.
These factors set parameters around the way we read and write. Next, we will go into detail about how these elements work and what happens when orthography isn't used properly.
Spelling is the way that we order the alphabet to form words in a standardised way.
Without a standardised spelling system, it would be hard to communicate through writing as we would have to decipher the meaning of words.
In certain situations, poor spelling can completely alter the meaning of a word; for example with the frequently confused pairings of homophones:
Stationary and stationery:
Stationary = still
Stationery = writing and office materials
There are also situations where the meaning may seem similar but, in fact, there is a difference in word class:
On the other hand, bad spelling in more formal contexts (i.e. a job application, a newspaper article) impacts the way a text is received as gives the impression that little effort has been put in. Misspellings, themselves, can be amusing to readers.
Punctuation is used to break up and organise text. It can be used to show where to pause, where to stop, and what kind of utterance is being used (an exclamation, a question, a quotation etc). There are 14 punctuation marks:
Name | Punctuation Mark | What does it do? |
Full stop | . | Denotes the end of a sentence |
Question mark | ? | Ends a sentence that is a question |
Exclamation mark | ! | Ends a sentence with emphasis and a loudness |
Comma | , | Inserts a pause in a sentence, makes a list, separate phrases |
Colon | : | Introduces something, emphasises something, presents direct speech, introduces lists. |
Semi colon | ; | Joins two independent clauses |
Slash | / | Substitute for "or" |
Dash (En-dash and Em-dash) | – or — | En-dash is shorter and is for ranges, Em-dash is longer for parenthesis |
Hyphen | - | Joins two connected words |
Square brackets | [ ] | Clarifies information further that might have been omitted |
Parenthesis | ( ) | Supplies further details on something |
Apostrophe | ' | Shows letters have been omitted, indicates possession |
Speech marks | " " | Denotes speech |
Ellipsis | ... | Suggests omission of words or a moment of suspense |
Here is a funny example of why punctuation is so important!
With punctuation:
"Let's eat, dad."
Without punctuation:
"Let's eat dad."
Capitalisation means putting a capital letter at the start of certain words. There are several reasons why we do this.
Most commonly, capitalisation is used at the beginning of a sentence, for example:
“There's no denying that the rain was heavy. Water was already beginning to spill from the walls. "
The new capital letter acts as a signpost, indicating the start of a new sentence.
Proper nouns also need to be capitalised in a sentence (no matter where in the sentence they occur). Proper nouns include names of people, places and months, among other things, that don't adopt a modifier in a sentence. An example:
"Jane was looking particularly happy as she walked idly through a field in Dorset."
In this example, both Jane and Dorset are proper nouns, and therefore need to be capitalised even if found at the end of a sentence.
Capital letters are also used at the beginning of quotes.
"He turned to look at me and whispered, "It's not safe out there. Just don't go outside. ”
As the speaker is starting a new sentence, the first word of the spoken part needs to be capitalised.
Most of the words in titles also require capitalisation, except conjunctions (words that join phrases together like and, because, etc), articles (words that indicate if a noun is specific or general like a and the) and prepositions (words that show where nouns are in relation to each other, like between, in etc). The words that require capitalisation are as follows: the first word of the title, nouns, verbs (no matter how short) and adjectives.
An example of a title could be:
Some Tips on How to Write Titles Properly
Capitalisation is important because it impacts the way a piece of writing is received. It may seem quite insulting if someone's name isn't properly capitalised. Alternatively, if there isn't proper capitalisation throughout the letter itself it may make it seem that there was minimal effort put into it, suggesting it hadn't been proofread properly.
There are several writing systems:
This is a writing system that uses ideograms (ideograms are pictures and images that exhibit certain ideas and concepts) in order to communicate. Whilst historically there are a few examples of this writing system, they are difficult to translate without a direct communicator between the verbal language and its written form. This is because ideograms are open to interpretation.
Although this type of writing system might be considered dead, it isn't entirely. It is still used in day-to-day life by many individuals in the form of emojis.
Naturally, this writing system lacks most of the orthographic features that we are used to in English. There is no need for certain elements of grammar such as capitalisation of letters because there are no letters to capitalise.
This system uses glyphs and symbols to represent entire words or morphemes. That said, there are no purely logographic writing systems. This is because some phonetic symbols are required to create new words when they expand under the influence of phonetic languages.
Some examples of logographic writing systems include, but are not limited to, the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Ancient Sumerian cuneiforms. Similarly, Chinese characters can be considered logographic.
Orthographically speaking, Ancient Egyptian would be a lot easier to write because it didn't have any punctuation as it was written to look beautiful. It doesn't mean all logographic languages don't use punctuation; for example, the various Chinese dialects use very similar punctuation to English. However, the symbols used to display these concepts are different and are deployed both horizontally and vertically.
This type of writing system uses written symbols (graphemes) to represent phonemic sounds (phonemes).
As a result of linguistic development, there are little-to-no languages that are perfectly phonemic. While Middle English was much more phonetic in its spelling than Modern English, ME has discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation, for example:
-Spelt: colonel Pronounced: ker-nel
-Spelt: choir Pronounced: kwy-uhr
Esperanto was conceived by Polish Ophthalmologist LL Zamenhof to be a universal language. It was created without any exceptions to any grammatical rules or pronunciation discrepancies to make it easier to learn. It is an entirely phonemic language, albeit an artificial one.
Phonemic languages use very similar grammar to English as they largely use the Latin alphabet and thus similar rules.
This writing system uses letters and symbols to represent the speech sounds in the language. In English, the letters in our alphabet go from A to Z. We put these letters together to form words.
What confusions might there be with Orthography in English language?
Writing systems and orthography are very closely intertwined. However, both are distinct terms in regards to language and linguistics.
A writing system usually refers to the way in which we visually represent speech (e.g. symbols, the alphabet, phonemes, etc.). However, orthography usually refers to the conventions for writing a language such as spelling, punctuation, and capitalisation.
The term 'orthographic word' can be used to refer to a single word that is separated by spaces on either side. For example, the sentence 'I love cheese pizza' has four orthographic words.
The term 'orthographic word' can be used to refer to a single word that is separated by spaces on either side. For example, the sentence 'I love cheese pizza' has four orthographic words.
Orthography is a term that refers to the conventions and rules of written language such as spelling, punctuation, and capitalisation.
Orthographic features are specific and standardised grammatical rules that are followed in written language.
The orthographic features in English are spelling, punctuation and capitalisation.
Examples of orthography include:
What is spelling?
The way letters are ordered in an accepted and conventionalised way.
What is the impact of poor spelling?
Poor spelling can undermine a text's authority, seriousness and purpose as it may cause a reader to question how much effort was truly put into the piece of writing.
What is the difference between a phoneme and a grapheme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound, while a grapheme is the depiction of a phoneme using letters.
What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning (i.e., the word 'cat' cannot be broken down into another meaning, but the word 'cats' can be).
What is etymology?
Etymology is the study of the historical roots of words.
How many IPA symbols are used in the English language?
44
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