The Myanmar Language Commission Transcription System (1980), also known as the MLC Transcription System (MLCTS), is a transliteration system for rendering Burmese in the Latin alphabet . It is loosely based on the common system for romanization of Pali , has some similarities to the ALA-LC romanization and was devised by the Myanmar Language Commission . The system is used in many linguistic publications regarding Burmese and is used in MLC publications as the primary form of romanization of Burmese .
36-467: The transcription system is based on the orthography of formal Burmese and is not suited for colloquial Burmese, which has substantial differences in phonology from formal Burmese. Differences are mentioned throughout the article. The following initials are listed in the traditional ordering of the Burmese script , with the transcriptions of the initials listed before their IPA equivalents: Sometimes used as
72-486: A final, but preceding diacritics determine its pronunciation. The Burmese alphabet is arranged in groups of five, and within each group, consonants can stack one another. The consonant above the stacked consonant is the final of the previous vowel. Most words of Sino-Tibetan origin are spelt without stacking, but polysyllabic words of Indo-European origin (such as Pali, Sanskrit, and English) are often spelt with stacking. Possible combinations are as follows: ang ga. li p
108-460: A number of detailed classifications have been proposed. Japanese is an example of a writing system that can be written using a combination of logographic kanji characters and syllabic hiragana and katakana characters; as with many non-alphabetic languages, alphabetic romaji characters may also be used as needed. Orthographies that use alphabets and syllabaries are based on the principle that written graphemes correspond to units of sound of
144-400: A particular style guide or spelling standard such as Oxford spelling . The English word orthography is first attested in the 15th century, ultimately from Ancient Greek : ὀρθός ( orthós 'correct') and γράφειν ( gráphein 'to write'). Orthography in phonetic writing systems is often concerned with matters of spelling , i.e. the correspondence between written graphemes and
180-456: A series of letters that represents no correctly spelled word of the same language at all (such as "leik" for "like") or a correct spelling of another word (such as writing "here" when one means "hear", or "no" when one means "know"). Misspellings of the latter type are called " atomic typos ", and they can easily make their way into printed material because they are not caught by simple computer spell checkers . Deliberate misspellings that emphasize
216-403: A type of abstraction , analogous to the phonemes of spoken languages; different physical forms of written symbols are considered to represent the same grapheme if the differences between them are not significant for meaning. Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all functionally equivalent. For example, in written English (or other languages using
252-501: Is a prescriptive element. Spellings originated as transcriptions of the sounds of speech according to the alphabetic principle . Fully phonemic orthography is usually only approximated, due to factors including changes in pronunciation over time, and the borrowing of vocabulary from other languages without adapting its spelling. Homophones may be spelled differently on purpose in order to disambiguate words that would otherwise have identical spellings. Standardization of spelling
288-574: Is a semivowel that comes before the vowel. Combinations of medials (such as h- and -r- ) are possible. They follow the following order in transcription: h- , -y- or -r- , and -w- . In Standard Burmese, there are three pronounced medials. The following are medials in the MLC Transcription System: The two medials are pronounced the same in Standard Burmese. In dialects such as Rakhine (Arakanese),
324-575: Is commonly known as " typosquatting ". English orthography has a broad degree of standardization. However, there are several ways to spell almost every sound, and most letters have several variants of pronunciation depending on their position in the word and context. Therefore, some spelling mistakes are common even among native speakers. This is mainly due to large number of words that were borrowed from other languages with no successful attempts of complete spelling reform. Most spelling rules usually do not reflect phonetic changes that have taken place since
360-517: Is connected with the development of writing and the establishment of modern standard dialects . Languages with established orthography are those languages that enjoy an official status and a degree of institutional support in a country. Therefore, normative spelling is a relatively recent development linked to the compiling of dictionaries (in many languages, special spelling dictionaries , also called orthographic dictionaries , are compiled, showing prescribed spelling of words but not their meanings),
396-554: Is discussed further at Phonemic orthography § Morphophonemic features . The syllabaries in the Japanese writing system ( hiragana and katakana ) are examples of almost perfectly shallow orthographies—the kana correspond with almost perfect consistency to the spoken syllables, although with a few exceptions where symbols reflect historical or morphophonemic features: notably the use of ぢ ji and づ zu (rather than じ ji and ず zu , their pronunciation in standard Tokyo dialect) when
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#1732851278050432-418: Is often perceived as an indicator of low intelligence, illiteracy , or lower class standing. Spelling tests are commonly used to assess a student's mastery of the words in the spelling lessons the student has received so far. They can also be an effective practice method. Spelling bees are competitions to determine the best speller of a group. Prominent spelling bees are sometimes even televised, such as
468-576: Is placed between slashes ( /b/ , /bæk/ ), and from phonetic transcription , which is placed between square brackets ( [b] , [bæk] ). The writing systems on which orthographies are based can be divided into a number of types, depending on what type of unit each symbol serves to represent. The principal types are logographic (with symbols representing words or morphemes), syllabic (with symbols representing syllables), and alphabetic (with symbols roughly representing phonemes). Many writing systems combine features of more than one of these types, and
504-586: Is uncommonly spelt ang ga. li t ( အင်္ဂလိတ် ). All consonantal finals are pronounced as glottal stops ( [ʔ] ), except for nasal finals. All possible combinations are as follows, and correspond to the colors of the initials above: Nasalised finals are transcribed differently. Transcriptions of the following diacritical combinations in Burmese for nasalised finals are as follows: Monophthongs are transcribed as follows: Oral vowels are shown with - . Nasal vowels are shown with -န် ( -an ). A medial
540-626: The Icelandic language is based on the etymological principle, like English; thus the Icelanders themselves experience difficulties in writing. The modern Icelandic alphabet is based on the standard introduced by the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask. The fundamental principles of the Spanish orthography are phonological and etymological, that is why there are several letters with identical phonemes. Beginning from
576-646: The Latin alphabet ), there are two different physical representations (glyphs) of the lowercase Latin letter a : ⟨a⟩ and ⟨ɑ⟩ . Since the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, which can be written | a | . The italic and boldface forms are also allographic. Graphemes or sequences of them are sometimes placed between angle brackets, as in | b | or | back | . This distinguishes them from phonemic transcription, which
612-618: The National Spelling Bee in the United States. Divergent spelling is a popular advertising technique, used to attract attention or to render a trademark "suggestive" rather than "merely descriptive", or to evade copyright restrictions. The pastry chains Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme , for example, employ non-standard spellings. While some words admit multiple spellings, some spellings are not considered standard. These are commonly called " misspellings ". A misspelled word can be
648-687: The caron on the letters | š | and | č | , which represent those same sounds in Czech ), or the addition of completely new symbols (as some languages have introduced the letter | w | to the Latin alphabet) or of symbols from another alphabet, such as the rune | þ | in Icelandic. After the classical period, Greek developed a lowercase letter system with diacritics to enable foreigners to learn pronunciation and grammatical features. As pronunciation of letters changed over time,
684-436: The phonemes found in speech. Other elements that may be considered part of orthography include hyphenation , capitalization , word boundaries , emphasis , and punctuation . Thus, orthography describes or defines the symbols used in writing, and the conventions that regulate their use. Most natural languages developed as oral languages and writing systems have usually been crafted or adapted as ways of representing
720-439: The changing pronunciation. Examples are: There have occasionally been English-language spelling reform proposals, at least since the 16th century, but they have made little impact apart from a few spellings preferred by Noah Webster having contributed to American and British English spelling differences . Learning proper spelling by rote is a traditional element of elementary education, and divergence from standard spelling
756-467: The character is a voicing of an underlying ち or つ (see rendaku ), and the use of は, を, and へ to represent the sounds わ, お, and え, as relics of historical kana usage . Korean hangul and Tibetan scripts were also originally extremely shallow orthographies, but as a representation of the modern language those frequently also reflect morphophonemic features. An orthography based on a correspondence to phonemes may sometimes lack characters to represent all
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#1732851278050792-430: The correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are highly complex or inconsistent is called a deep orthography (or less formally, the language is said to have irregular spelling ). An orthography with relatively simple and consistent correspondences is called shallow (and the language has regular spelling ). One of the main reasons why spelling and pronunciation diverge is that sound changes taking place in
828-439: The diacritics were reduced to representing the stressed syllable. In Modern Greek typesetting, this system has been simplified to only have a single accent to indicate which syllable is stressed. Spelling Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language . Spelling is one of the elements of orthography , and highly standardized spelling
864-572: The end of the 15th century (for example, the Great Vowel Shift ). Portuguese spelling is not strictly phonematic. It is associated with an extension of the Portuguese language and the emergence of numerous regional and dialect variants. In 2009 the global reform of the Portuguese language was initiated to eliminate 98% of inconsistencies in spelling between various countries. The orthography of
900-550: The founding of national academies and other institutions of language maintenance, including widespread education and literacy , and often does not apply to minority and regional languages . In countries or regions where there is an authoritative language academy , such as France, the Netherlands, and the German-speaking areas, reforms have occasionally been introduced (not always successfully) so that spelling better matches
936-659: The latter is pronounced [r] . When the medial ှ is spelt with ra. ( ရ ), its sound becomes hra. [ʃa̰] ( ရှ ), which was once represented by hsya. ( သျှ ). Formal Burmese has four abbreviated symbols, which are typically used in literary works: Orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language , including norms of spelling , punctuation , word boundaries , capitalization , hyphenation , and emphasis . Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than
972-515: The orthographic conventions adopted, as is the case with American/British English distinctions. Misspelling can also be a matter of opinion when variant spellings are accepted by some and not by others. For example, "miniscule" (for "minuscule") is a misspelling to many, and yet it is listed as an acceptable variant in some dictionaries. A well-known internet scam involves the registration of domain names that are deliberate misspellings of well-known corporate names to mislead or defraud. The practice
1008-530: The phonemic distinctions in the language. This is called a defective orthography . An example in English is the lack of any indication of stress . Another is the digraph | th | , which represents two different phonemes (as in then and thin ) and replaced the old letters | ð | and | þ | . A more systematic example is that of abjads like the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, in which
1044-415: The pronunciation of a regional dialect are part of eye dialect (such as writing "'Murica'" instead of "America", or "helluva" instead of "hell of a"). Misspellings may be due to accidental typing errors (e.g. the transposition error teh for the ), lack of knowledge of the normative spelling, or lack of concern over spelling rules at all. Whether or not a word is misspelled may depend on context and
1080-552: The short vowels are normally left unwritten and must be inferred by the reader. When an alphabet is borrowed from its original language for use with a new language—as has been done with the Latin alphabet for many languages, or Japanese katakana for non-Japanese words—it often proves defective in representing the new language's phonemes. Sometimes this problem is addressed by the use of such devices as digraphs (such as | sh | and | ch | in English, where pairs of letters represent single sounds), diacritics (like
1116-438: The spoken language are not always reflected in the orthography, and hence spellings correspond to historical rather than present-day pronunciation. One consequence of this is that many spellings come to reflect a word's morphophonemic structure rather than its purely phonemic structure (for example, the English regular past tense morpheme is consistently spelled -ed in spite of its different pronunciations in various words). This
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1152-586: The spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g. would and should ); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster 's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g. honor and honour ). Orthographic norms develop through social and political influence at various levels, such as encounters with print in education,
1188-440: The spoken language. The rules for doing this tend to become standardized for a given language, leading to the development of an orthography that is generally considered "correct". In linguistics , orthography often refers to any method of writing a language without judgement as to right and wrong, with a scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a spectrum of strength of convention. The original sense of
1224-538: The spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and syllables in the latter. In virtually all cases, this correspondence is not exact. Different languages' orthographies offer different degrees of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. English , French , Danish , and Thai orthographies, for example, are highly irregular, whereas the orthographies of languages such as Russian , German , Spanish , Finnish , Turkish , and Serbo-Croatian represent pronunciation much more faithfully. An orthography in which
1260-536: The word, though, implies a dichotomy of correct and incorrect, and the word is still most often used to refer specifically to a standardized prescriptive manner of writing. A distinction is made between emic and etic viewpoints, with the emic approach taking account of perceptions of correctness among language users, and the etic approach being purely descriptive, considering only the empirical qualities of any system as used. Orthographic units, such as letters of an alphabet , are conceptualized as graphemes . These are
1296-674: The workplace, and the state. Some nations have established language academies in an attempt to regulate aspects of the national language, including its orthography—such as the Académie Française in France and the Royal Spanish Academy in Spain. No such authority exists for most languages, including English. Some non-state organizations, such as newspapers of record and academic journals , choose greater orthographic homogeneity by enforcing
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