Orthographic difficulties

The individual character of the language is reflected in the system of its orthographic rules. There are four basic principles that govern English and other European languages: 1) phonetic; 2) grammatical, or morphological; 3) traditional, or historical, or conservative; 4) ideographic, or hieroglyphic.

1. The phonetic principle means that word spelling corresponds to its pronunciation (Russian: стол, стул; English: be, body, it, sit, not, bed).

2. The grammatical principle means that word spelling is defined by grammar rules irrespective of phonetic deviations in pronunciation of one and the same letter (Russian: ст о л – ст о ла [сталá]; English: to get read y – read i ly – read i ness are a clear example of the change of y into i after consonants while adding suffixes like –ly, -ness, -less, -ty, -ful and other words ending in –ful in word building). Those who call this principle morphological usually stress that the morphemic composition of the word is taken into account when writing a word (Russian: рыба, рыбка; the stem morpheme is рыб; in English: answered, asked; theaffixmorphemeis –ed).

3. The traditional principle means that word spelling is defined by the history of the word development. In other words, spelling reflects the pronunciation of earlier periods in the history of the language (in Russian: когда, жил; in English: b u sy, d augh ter, br ough t, t ea ch, o ne, t w o). Another occasion of the historical principle is the case where many letters are pronounced in some words and are mute in other words: b ui ld – s ui t, h elp – h our, br ough t – l augh.

4. The ideographic principle means that different signs in writing are used to distinguish between homonyms. This means that different letters or letter combinations in different words are read the same way: I - eye – ay, r o de – r oa d, t ai l – tale, kn ow – n o and so on. In some cases the same letters in different words are read differently: f a t, f a te,f a re, f a r.

The degree of difficulty in spelling depends on the predominant principle in the orthography of the language.For instance, the Spanish orthography, with its prevailing phonetic principle, is simpler than the ones of English and French, based on the traditional principle. Thus, words subject to the phonetic principle are considered the easiest to learn, whilst words subject to the traditional principle of writing appear to be the most difficult. Unfortunately, as far as the first thousand words in English are concerned, they are subject to the historical principle. The Russians suffer from an additional difficulty, because in the Russian language the morphological principle prevails.

The discrepancy that exists in the English language between pronunciation and spelling may be explained by the fact that there are more sounds in the language than there are letters to stand for these sounds. Thus, there are 23 vowel sounds in English and only 6 letters to convey them.

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