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144-491: English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language , allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthography includes norms for spelling , hyphenation , capitalisation , word breaks , emphasis , and punctuation . As with the orthographies of most other world languages , written English
288-468: A (GA) , alg ae , qu ay , b ea ch , b ee , dec ei t , p eo ple , k ey , k eye d , f ie ld ( hyg ie n e ), am oe ba , cham oi s (GA) , deng ue (GA) , beg ui ne , g uy ot , and y nambu (See Sound-to-spelling correspondences ). (These examples assume a more-or-less standard non-regional British English accent. Other accents will vary.) Sometimes everyday speakers of English change counterintuitive spellings, with
432-488: A diary or journal). The global spread of digital communication systems such as e-mail and social media has made writing an increasingly important feature of daily life, where these systems mix with older technologies like paper, pencils, whiteboards, printers, and copiers. Substantial amounts of everyday writing characterize most workplaces in developed countries . In many occupations (e.g. law, accounting , software design , human resources ), written documentation
576-442: A " text ", is a series of physically inscribed , mechanically transferred , or digitally represented symbols. The interpreter or activator of a text is called a "reader". In general, writing systems do not constitute languages in and of themselves, but rather a means of encoding language such that it can be read by others across time and space. While not all languages use a writing system, those that do can complement and extend
720-778: A complex interaction among available tools, intentions, cultural customs, cognitive routines, genres, tacit and explicit knowledge, and the constraints and limitations of the writing system(s) deployed. Inscriptions have been made with fingers , styluses , quills , ink brushes , pencils , pens , and many styles of lithography ; surfaces used for these inscriptions include stone tablets , clay tablets , bamboo slats, papyrus , wax tablets , vellum , parchment , paper , copperplate , slate , porcelain , and other enameled surfaces . The Incas used knotted cords known as quipu (or khipu) for keeping records. The typewriter and subsequently various digital word processors have recently become widespread writing tools, and studies have compared
864-447: A few phonological rules, but that is not the reason why its spelling is fixed. Another example involves the vowel differences (with accompanying stress pattern changes) in several related words. For instance, photographer is derived from photograph by adding the derivational suffix - ⟨er⟩ . When this suffix is added, the vowel pronunciations change largely owing to the moveable stress: Other examples of this type are
1008-516: A given word class is subject to inflection in a particular language, there are generally one or more standard patterns of inflection (the paradigms described below) that words in that class may follow. Words which follow such a standard pattern are said to be regular ; those that inflect differently are called irregular . For instance, many languages that feature verb inflection have both regular verbs and irregular verbs . In English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with
1152-543: A large number of Germanic words have ⟨y⟩ in word-final position. Some other examples are ⟨ph⟩ pronounced / f / (which is most commonly ⟨f⟩ ), and ⟨ch⟩ pronounced / k / (which is most commonly ⟨c⟩ or ⟨k⟩ ). The use of these spellings for these sounds often marks words that have been borrowed from Greek . Some researchers, such as Brengelman (1970), have suggested that, in addition to this marking of word origin, these spellings indicate
1296-411: A large number of other languages throughout the history of English , without successful attempts at complete spelling reforms , and partly due to accidents of history, such as some of the earliest mass-produced English publications being typeset by highly trained, multilingual printing compositors , who occasionally used a spelling pattern more typical for another language. For example, the word ghost
1440-620: A more dependable method for creating permanent records of transactions. On the other hand, writing in both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica may have evolved through the political necessity to manage the calendar for recording historical and environmental events. Further innovations included more uniform, predictable, and widely dispersed legal systems, the distribution of accessible versions of sacred texts , and furthering practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge management , all of which were largely reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of inscribed language. The history of writing
1584-530: A more formal level of style or register in a given text, although Rollings (2004) finds this point to be exaggerated as there would be many exceptions where a word with one of these spellings, such as ⟨ph⟩ for / f / (like telephone ), could occur in an informal text. Spelling may also be useful to distinguish in written language between homophones (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings), and thus resolve potential ambiguities that would arise otherwise. However in most cases
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#17328545342201728-455: A mountainous Egyptian mining site known as Serabit el-Khadem. This site was also home to a temple of Hathor, the "Mistress of turquoise". A later, two line inscription has also been found at Wadi el-Hol in Central Egypt. Based on hieroglyphic prototypes, but also including entirely new symbols, each sign apparently stood for a consonant rather than a word: the basis of an alphabetic system. It
1872-660: A segment is referred to as partial reduplication . Reduplication can serve both derivational and inflectional functions. A few examples are given below: Palancar and Léonard provided an example with Tlatepuzco Chinantec (an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Southern Mexico ), where tones are able to distinguish mood, person, and number: Case can be distinguished with tone as well, as in Maasai language (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania ) (Hyman, 2016): Because
2016-536: A semantic (meaning) element called a radical with an existing character to indicate the pronunciation, called a phonetic . However, such phonetic elements complement the logographic elements, rather than vice versa. The main logographic system in use today is Chinese characters , used with some modification for the various languages or dialects of China , Japan , and sometimes in Korean , although in South and North Korea ,
2160-553: A sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many Native American languages ) are called polysynthetic languages . Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish , are known as agglutinative languages , while languages in which a single inflection can convey multiple grammatical roles (such as both nominative case and plural, as in Latin and German ) are called fusional . In English most nouns are inflected for number with
2304-449: A separate entry; the same goes for jump and jumped . Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages , which is a synonym for inflected languages . Morphemes may be added in several different ways: Reduplication is a morphological process where a constituent is repeated. The direct repetition of a word or root is called total reduplication (or full reduplication ). The repetition of
2448-473: A set of inflectional endings), where a class of words follow the same pattern. Nominal inflectional paradigms are called declensions , and verbal inflectional paradigms are termed conjugations . For instance, there are five types of Latin declension . Words that belong to the first declension usually end in -a and are usually feminine. These words share a common inflectional framework. In Old English , nouns are divided into two major categories of declension,
2592-910: A similar degree of difficulty when encoding (writing), English is more difficult when decoding (reading), as there are clearly many more possible pronunciations of a group of letters. For example, in French, /u/ (as in "true", but short), can be spelled ⟨ou, ous, out, oux⟩ ( ou , nous , tout , choux ), but the pronunciation of each of those sequences is always the same. However, in English, while /uː/ can be spelled in up to 24 different ways, including ⟨oo, u, ui, ue, o, oe, ou, ough, ew⟩ ( spook , truth , suit , blues , to , shoe , group , through , few ) (see Sound-to-spelling correspondences below), all of these spellings have other pronunciations as well (e.g., as in foot , us , build , bluest , so , toe , grout , plough , sew ) (See
2736-508: A source of spelling innovations: diminutive versions of women's names that sound the same as men's names have been spelled differently: Nikki and Nicky , Toni and Tony , Jo and Joe . The differentiation in between names that are spelled differently but have the same phonetic sound may come from modernisation or different countries of origin. For example, Isabelle and Isabel sound the same but are spelled differently; these versions are from France and Spain respectively. As an example of
2880-540: A suffix but a clitic , although some linguists argue that it has properties of both. Old Norse was inflected, but modern Swedish , Norwegian , and Danish have lost much of their inflection. Grammatical case has largely died out with the exception of pronouns , just like English. However, adjectives , nouns , determiners and articles still have different forms according to grammatical number and grammatical gender. Danish and Swedish only inflect for two different genders while Norwegian has to some degree retained
3024-735: A variant of the early Greek alphabet, gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet and its own descendants, such as the Latin alphabet and Runes . Other descendants from the Greek alphabet include Cyrillic , used to write Bulgarian , Russian and Serbian , among others. The Phoenician system was also adapted into the Aramaic script , from which the Hebrew and the Arabic scripts are descended. The Tifinagh script (Berber languages)
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#17328545342203168-418: A verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding - s to the root dog to form dogs and adding - ed to wait to form waited . In contrast, derivation is the process of adding derivational morphemes , which create a new word from existing words and change
3312-538: A word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense , case , voice , aspect , person , number , gender , mood , animacy , and definiteness . The inflection of verbs is called conjugation , while the inflection of nouns , adjectives , adverbs , etc. can be called declension . An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix , suffix , infix , circumfix , and transfix ), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut ), or other modifications. For example,
3456-401: A word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word). For example, the English word cars is a noun that is inflected for number , specifically to express the plural; the content morpheme car is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while
3600-471: A word. For instance, ⟨gh⟩ represents /f/ at the end of some words ( tough / t ʌ f / ) but not in others ( plough / p l aʊ / ). At the beginning of syllables , ⟨gh⟩ is pronounced /ɡ/ , as in ghost / ɡ oʊ s t / . Conversely, ⟨gh⟩ is never pronounced /f/ in syllable onsets other than in inflected forms, and is almost never pronounced /ɡ/ in syllable codas (the proper name Pittsburgh
3744-536: Is Modern English, as compared to Old English. In general, languages where deflexion occurs replace inflectional complexity with more rigorous word order , which provides the lost inflectional details. Most Slavic languages and some Indo-Aryan languages are an exception to the general Indo-European deflexion trend, continuing to be highly inflected (in some cases acquiring additional inflectional complexity and grammatical genders , as in Czech & Marathi ). Old English
3888-488: Is a set of written symbols that represent consonants and vowels . In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the letters would correspond perfectly to the language's phonemes . Thus, a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. However, as languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for,
4032-469: Is also inflected according to case. Its declension is defective , in the sense that it lacks a reflexive form. The following table shows the conjugation of the verb to arrive in the indicative mood : suffixes inflect it for person, number, and tense: The non-finite forms arriv e (bare infinitive), arriv ed (past participle) and arriv ing (gerund/present participle), although not inflected for person or number, can also be regarded as part of
4176-563: Is also simplified in common usage. Afrikaans , recognized as a distinct language in its own right rather than a Dutch dialect only in the early 20th century, has lost almost all inflection. The Romance languages , such as Spanish , Italian , French , Portuguese and especially – with its many cases – Romanian , have more overt inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation . Adjectives, nouns and articles are considerably less inflected than verbs, but they still have different forms according to number and grammatical gender. Latin ,
4320-477: Is an exception). Some words contain silent letters , which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the ⟨l⟩ in talk , half , calf , etc., the ⟨w⟩ in two and sword , ⟨gh⟩ as mentioned above in numerous words such as though , daughter , night , brought , and the commonly encountered silent ⟨e⟩ (discussed further below). Another type of spelling characteristic
4464-403: Is as yet undeciphered. The term 'Indus script' is mainly applied to that used in the mature Harappan phase, which perhaps evolved from a few signs found in early Harappa after 3500 BC. The script is written from right to left, and sometimes follows a boustrophedonic style. In 2015, the epigrapher Bryan Wells estimated there were around 694 distinct signs. This is above 400, so scholars accept
English orthography - Misplaced Pages Continue
4608-405: Is broadly standardised. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme , and most letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context. This is partly due to the large number of words that have been loaned from
4752-650: Is co-extensive with uses of writing and the elaboration of activity systems that give rise to and circulate writing. Individual motivations for writing include improvised additional capacity for the limitations of human memory (e.g. to-do lists , recipes , reminders, logbooks , maps , the proper sequence for a complicated task or important ritual ), dissemination of ideas and coordination (e.g. essays , monographs , broadsides , plans , petitions , or manifestos ), creativity and storytelling , maintaining kinship and other social networks, business correspondence regarding goods and services, and life writing (e.g.
4896-477: Is descended from the Libyco-Berber script , which is assumed to be of Phoenician origin. In the history of writing , religious texts or writing have played a special role. For example, some religious text compilations have been some of the earliest popular texts, or even the only written texts in some languages, and in some cases are still highly popular around the world. The first books printed widely using
5040-509: Is explicitly directed toward the learning of writing, but much is focused more on subject learning. Writing systems may be broadly classified according to what units of language are represented by its symbols: alphabets and syllabaries generally represent a language's sounds of speech ( phonemes and syllables respectively)—while logographies represent a language's units of meaning ( words or morphemes ), though these are still associated by readers with their given pronunciations in
5184-503: Is frequently seen with the -ed suffix in archaic and pseudoarchaic writing, e.g. cursèd indicates the ⟨e⟩ should be fully pronounced. The grave being to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced ( warnèd , parlìament ). In certain older texts (typically British ), the use of the ligatures ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ is common in words such as archæology , diarrhœa , and encyclopædia , all of Latin or Greek origin. Nowadays,
5328-432: Is marked by the ⟨e⟩ as having the value /eɪ/ . In this context, the ⟨e⟩ is not pronounced, and is referred to as a " silent e ". A single letter may even fill multiple pronunciation-marking roles simultaneously. For example, in the word ace , ⟨e⟩ marks not only the change of ⟨a⟩ from / æ / to /eɪ/ , but also of ⟨c⟩ from / k / to / s / . In
5472-432: Is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, the sounds denoted by the letters depend on the surrounding letters. For example, ⟨th⟩ represents two different sounds (the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives ) (see Pronunciation of English th ), and
5616-517: Is not an independent glyph for each syllable. While research into the development of writing during the Neolithic is ongoing, the current consensus is that it first evolved from economic necessity in the ancient Near East . Writing most likely began as a consequence of political expansion in ancient cultures, which needed reliable means for transmitting information, maintaining financial accounts, keeping historical records, and similar activities. Around
5760-508: Is not only the main deliverable but also the mode of work itself. Even in occupations not typically associated with writing, routine records management has most employees writing at least some of the time. Some professions are typically associated with writing, such as literary authors, journalists, and technical writers, but writing is pervasive in most modern forms of work, civic participation, household management, and leisure activities. Writing permeates everyday commerce. For example, in
5904-642: Is probably fairly close to optimal for all modern English dialects, as well as for the attested dialects of the past several hundred years. In these cases, a given morpheme (i.e., a component of a word) has a fixed spelling even though it is pronounced differently in different words. An example is the past tense suffix - ⟨ed⟩ , which may be pronounced variously as /t/ , /d/ , or /ᵻd/ (for example, pay / ˈ p eɪ / , payed / ˈ p eɪ d / , hate / ˈ h eɪ t / , hated / ˈ h eɪ t ɪ d / ). As it happens, these different pronunciations of - ⟨ed⟩ can be predicted by
English orthography - Misplaced Pages Continue
6048-413: Is related to word origin. For example, when representing a vowel, ⟨y⟩ represents the sound / ɪ / in some words borrowed from Greek (reflecting an original upsilon ), whereas the letter usually representing this sound in non-Greek words is the letter ⟨i⟩ . Thus, myth / ˈ m ɪ θ / is of Greek origin, while pith / ˈ p ɪ θ / is a Germanic word. However,
6192-470: Is the act of creating a persistent representation of human language . A writing system uses a set of symbols and rules to encode aspects of spoken language, such as its lexicon and syntax . However, written language may take on characteristics distinct from those of any spoken language. Writing is a cognitive and social activity involving neuropsychological and physical processes . The outcome of this activity, also called "writing", and sometimes
6336-699: Is typically published as articles in journals or within book-length monographs . Arguments, experiments, observational data, and other evidence collated in the course of research is represented in writing, and serves as the basis for later work. Data collection and drafting of manuscripts may be supported by grants, which usually require proposals establishing the value of such work and the need for funding. The data and procedures are also typically collected in lab notebooks or other preliminary files. Preprints of potential publications may also be presented at academic or disciplinary conferences or on publicly accessible web servers to gain peer feedback and build interest in
6480-439: Is written and spoken in any given location. Letters in English orthography positioned at one location within a specific word usually represent a particular phoneme . For example, at / ˈ æ t / consists of 2 letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨t⟩ , which represent / æ / and / t / , respectively. Sequences of letters may perform this role as well as single letters. Thus, in thrash / θ r æ ʃ / ,
6624-501: The Narmer Palette , dating to c. 3100 BC , and several recent discoveries that may be slightly older, though these glyphs were based on a much older artistic rather than written tradition. The hieroglyphic script was logographic with phonetic adjuncts that included an effective alphabet . The world's oldest deciphered sentence was found on a seal impression found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Abydos, which dates from
6768-771: The Proto-Indo-European language was highly inflected, all of its descendant Indo-European languages , such as Albanian , Armenian , English , German , Ukrainian , Russian , Persian , Kurdish , Italian , Irish , Spanish , French , Hindi , Marathi , Urdu , Bengali , and Nepali , are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin , Ancient Greek , Old English , Old Norse , Old Church Slavonic and Sanskrit are extensively inflected because of their temporal proximity to Proto-Indo-European. Deflexion has caused modern versions of some Indo-European languages that were previously highly inflected to be much less so; an example
6912-770: The Spelling-to-sound correspondences below). Thus, in unfamiliar words and proper nouns , the pronunciation of some sequences, ⟨ough⟩ being the prime example, is unpredictable to even educated native English speakers. Attempts to regularise or reform the spelling of English have usually failed. However, Noah Webster promoted more phonetic spellings in the United States, such as flavor for British flavour , fiber for fibre , defense for defence , analyze for analyse , catalog for catalogue , and so forth. These spellings already existed as alternatives, but Webster's dictionaries helped standardise them in
7056-481: The Sumerian language and Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of ancestral proto-writing systems between 3400 and 3300 BC, with earliest coherent texts from c. 2600 BC . It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or
7200-520: The communicative competence of native speakers. Followers of these arguments believe the less abstract surface forms are more "psychologically real" and thus more useful in terms of pedagogy . Some English words can be written with diacritics ; these are mostly loanwords , usually from French. As vocabulary becomes naturalised, there is an increasing tendency to omit the accent marks, even in formal writing. For example, rôle and hôtel originally had accents when they were borrowed into English, but now
7344-544: The development of writing were driven by pragmatic exigencies like keeping track of produce and other wealth, recording history , maintaining culture , codifying knowledge through curricula and lists of texts deemed to contain foundational knowledge (e.g. The Canon of Medicine ) or artistic value (e.g. the literary canon ), organizing and governing societies through texts including legal codes , census records, contracts , deeds of ownership, taxation , trade agreements , and treaties . As Charles Bazerman explains,
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#17328545342207488-495: The digraph ⟨th⟩ (two letters) represents /θ/ . In hatch / h æ tʃ / , the trigraph ⟨tch⟩ represents /tʃ/ . Less commonly, a single letter can represent multiple successive sounds. The most common example is ⟨x⟩ , which normally represents the consonant cluster /ks/ (for example, in tax / t æ k s / ). The same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced differently when occurring in different positions within
7632-776: The history of the English language . There are a number of contributing factors. First, gradual changes in pronunciation, such as the Great Vowel Shift , account for a tremendous number of irregularities. Second, relatively recent loan words generally carry their original spellings, which are often not phonetic in English. The romanization of languages (e.g., Chinese) has further complicated this problem, for example when pronouncing Chinese proper names (of people or places), which use either pinyin (official in China) or Wade–Giles (official in Taiwan). The regular spelling system of Old English
7776-659: The insertion of /ᵻ/ before the /z/ in the spelling - ⟨es⟩ , but does not indicate the devoiced /s/ distinctly from the unaffected /z/ in the spelling - ⟨s⟩ . The abstract representation of words as indicated by the orthography can be considered advantageous since it makes etymological relationships more apparent to English readers. This makes writing English more complex, but arguably makes reading English more efficient. However, very abstract underlying representations, such as that of Chomsky & Halle (1968) or of underspecification theories, are sometimes considered too abstract to accurately reflect
7920-405: The printing press were bibles . Such texts enabled rapid spread and maintenance of societal cohesion, collective identity , motivations, justifications and beliefs that e.g. notably historically supported or enabled large-scale warfare between modern humans . Inflection In linguistic morphology , inflection (less commonly, inflexion ) is a process of word formation in which
8064-466: The strong and weak ones, as shown below: The terms "strong declension" and "weak declension" are primarily relevant to well-known dependent-marking languages (such as the Indo-European languages , or Japanese ). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional (prepositional or postpositional) phrases can carry inflectional morphemes. In head-marking languages , the adpositions can carry
8208-502: The voiceless alveolar sibilant can be represented by ⟨s⟩ or ⟨c⟩ . It is, however, not (solely) the shortage of letters which makes English spelling irregular. Its irregularities are caused mainly by the use of many different spellings for some of its sounds, such as /uː/, /iː/ and /oʊ/ ( t oo , tr ue , sh oe , fl ew , thr ough ; sl ee ve , l ea ve , e ven , s ei ze , s ie ge ; st o l e , c oa l , b ow l , r ol l , o ld , m ou ld ), and
8352-467: The "marking of signs on stones, clay, paper, and now digital memories—each more portable and rapidly traveling than the previous—provided means for increasingly coordinated and extended action as well as memory across larger groups of people over time and space." For example, around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became
8496-424: The - ⟨ity⟩ suffix (as in agile vs. agility , acid vs. acidity , divine vs. divinity , sane vs. sanity ). See also: Trisyllabic laxing . Another example includes words like mean / ˈ m iː n / and meant / ˈ m ɛ n t / , where ⟨ea⟩ is pronounced differently in the two related words. Thus, again, the orthography uses only a single spelling that corresponds to
8640-467: The 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration outgrew the power of memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form. The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the emergence of civilisations and the beginning of the Bronze Age during the late 4th millennium BC. Cuneiform used to write
8784-430: The 7th millennium BC, but whether or not these symbols are related to the characters of the later oracle bone script is disputed. Over the centuries, three distinct Elamite scripts developed. Proto-Elamite is the oldest known writing system from Iran. In use only briefly ( c. 3200 – c. 2900 BC ), clay tablets with Proto-Elamite writing have been found at different sites across Iran, with
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#17328545342208928-459: The English mice , children and women (see English plural ) and the French yeux (the plural of œil , "eye"); and irregular comparative and superlative forms of adjectives or adverbs, such as the English better and best (which correspond to the positive form good or well ). Irregularities can have four basic causes: For more details on some of the considerations that apply to regularly and irregularly inflected forms, see
9072-422: The English language. Despite the march toward regularization, modern English retains traces of its ancestry, with a minority of its words still using inflection by ablaut (sound change, mostly in verbs) and umlaut (a particular type of sound change, mostly in nouns), as well as long-short vowel alternation. For example: For details, see English plural , English verbs , and English irregular verbs . When
9216-483: The Latin debitum , and ⟨s⟩ in island to link it to Latin insula instead of its true origin, the Old English word īġland . ⟨p⟩ in ptarmigan has no etymological justification whatsoever, only seeking to show Greek origin despite being a Gaelic word. The spelling of English continues to evolve. Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to
9360-411: The Latin verb ducam , meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix -am , expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb. The inflected form of
9504-639: The Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BC). There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras. By the Greco-Roman period, there are more than 5,000. Writing was very important in maintaining the Egyptian empire , and literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes . Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train to become scribes, in
9648-805: The UK. Partly because English has never had any official regulating authority for spelling, such as the Spanish Real Academia Española , the French Académie française , the German Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung , the Danish Sprognævn , and the Thai Ratchabandittayasapha , English spelling, compared to many other languages, is quite irregular and complex. Although French, Danish, and Thai, among other languages, present
9792-409: The United States. (See American and British English spelling differences for details.) Besides the quirks the English spelling system has inherited from its past, there are other irregularities in spelling that make it tricky to learn. English contains, depending on dialect , 24–27 consonant phonemes and 13–20 vowels . However, there are only 26 letters in the modern English alphabet , so there
9936-556: The above four cases to the locative marking them by differences in the use of prepositions. Lithuanian breaks them out of the genitive case , accusative case and locative case by using different postpositions. Dual form is obsolete in standard Latvian and nowadays it is also considered nearly obsolete in standard Lithuanian. For instance, in standard Lithuanian it is normal to say "dvi varnos (plural) – two crows" instead of "dvi varni (dual)". Adjectives, pronouns, and numerals are declined for number, gender, and case to agree with
10080-451: The accents are almost never used. The words were originally considered foreign—and some people considered that English alternatives were preferable—but today their foreign origin is largely forgotten. Words most likely to retain the accent are those atypical of English morphology and therefore still perceived as slightly foreign. For example, café and pâté both have a pronounced final ⟨e⟩ , which would otherwise be silent under
10224-597: The adoption of Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC), Old Aramaic was also adapted to Mesopotamian cuneiform. The last cuneiform scripts in Akkadian discovered thus far date from the 1st century AD. The earliest known hieroglyphs are about 5,200 years old, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called "Scorpion I" (Naqada IIIA period, c. 32nd century BC ) recovered at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab) in 1998 or
10368-581: The advancement of their own research, does it become codified as contingently reliable knowledge. News and news reporting are central to citizen engagement and knowledge of many spheres of activity people may be interested in about the state of their community, including the actions and integrity of their governments and government officials, economic trends, natural disasters and responses to them, international geopolitical events, including conflicts, but also sports, entertainment, books, and other leisure activities. While news and newspapers have grown rapidly from
10512-405: The article on regular and irregular verbs . Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes : An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme or root word is called its declension if it is a noun, or its conjugation if it is a verb. Below is the declension of the English pronoun I , which is inflected for case and number. The pronoun who
10656-431: The capacities of spoken language by creating durable forms of language that can be transmitted across space (e.g. written correspondence ) and stored over time (e.g. libraries or other public records). Writing can also have knowledge-transforming effects, since it allows humans to externalize their thinking in forms that are easier to reflect on, elaborate on, reconsider, and revise. Any instance of writing involves
10800-626: The capital of Turkmenistan , revealed an inscription on a piece of stone that was used as a stamp seal. The earliest surviving examples of writing in China—inscriptions on oracle bones , usually tortoise plastrons and ox scapulae which were used for divination—date from around 1200 BC, during the Late Shang period. A small number of bronze inscriptions from the same period have also survived. In 2003, archaeologists reported discoveries of isolated tortoise-shell carvings dating back to
10944-417: The conjugation of the verb to arrive . Compound verb forms , such as I have arrived , I had arrived , or I will arrive , can be included also in the conjugation of the verb for didactic purposes, but they are not overt inflections of arrive . The formula for deriving the covert form, in which the relevant inflections do not occur in the main verb, is An inflectional paradigm refers to a pattern (usually
11088-648: The consonant sound itself when they come from different morphemes, as with the ⟨nn⟩ in unnamed ( un + named ). Any given letters may have dual functions. For example, ⟨u⟩ in statue has a sound-representing function (representing the sound / u / ) and a pronunciation-marking function (marking the ⟨t⟩ as having the value / tʃ / opposed to the value / t / ). Like many other alphabetic orthographies, English spelling does not represent non-contrastive phonetic sounds (that is, minor differences in pronunciation which are not used to distinguish between different words). Although
11232-559: The container's surface, one picture for each instance of the token inside. They next dispensed with the tokens, relying solely on symbols for the tokens, drawn on clay surfaces. To avoid making a picture for each instance of the same object (for example: 100 pictures of a hat to represent 100 hats), they counted the objects by using various small marks. In this way the Sumerians added "a system for enumerating objects to their incipient system of symbols". The original Mesopotamian writing system
11376-473: The conventional orthography ... and are, as is well known, related to the underlying forms of a much earlier historical stage of the language. There has, in other words, been little change in lexical representation since Middle English , and, consequently, we would expect ... that lexical representation would differ very little from dialect to dialect in Modern English ... [and] that conventional orthography
11520-520: The corresponding spoken language. A logography is written using logograms —written characters which represent individual words or morphemes . For example, in Mayan, the glyph for "fin", pronounced ka , was also used to represent the syllable ka whenever the pronunciation of a logogram needed to be indicated. Many logograms have an ideographic component (Chinese "radicals", hieroglyphic "determiners"). In Chinese, about 90% of characters are compounds of
11664-540: The course of an afternoon, a wholesaler might receive a written inquiry about the availability of a product line, then communicate with suppliers and fabricators through work orders and purchase agreements, correspond via email to affirm shipping availability with a drayage company, write an invoice, and request proof of receipt in the form of a written signature. At a much larger scale, modern systems of finances, banking, and business rest on many forms of written documents—including written regulations, policies, and procedures;
11808-785: The creation of reports and other monitoring documents to make, evaluate, and provide accountability for decisions and operations; the creation and maintenance of records; internal written communications within departments to coordinate work; written communications that comprise work products presented to other departments and to clients; and external communications to clients and the public. Business and financial organizations also rely on many written legal documents, such as contracts, reports to government agencies, tax records, and accounting reports. Financial institutions and markets that hold, transmit, trade, insure, or regulate holdings for clients or other institutions are particularly dependent on written records (though now often in digital form) to maintain
11952-482: The degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language. In most of the alphabets of the Middle East, it is usually only the consonants of a word that are written, although vowels may be indicated by the addition of various diacritical marks. Writing systems based primarily on writing just consonants phonemes date back to
12096-563: The earliest). Linear B , the writing system of the Mycenaean Greeks , has been deciphered while Linear A has yet to be deciphered. The sequence and the geographical spread of the three overlapping, but distinct writing systems can be summarized as follows (beginning date refers to first attestations, the assumed origins of all scripts lie further back in the past): Cretan hieroglyphs were used in Crete from c. 1625 to 1500 BC; Linear A
12240-433: The eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the changing economics and ability to produce and distribute news have brought about radical and rapid challenges to journalism and the consequent organization of citizen knowledge and engagement. These changes have also created challenges for journalism ethics that have been developed over the past century. Formal education is the social context most strongly associated with
12384-509: The ending -[e]d . Therefore, verbs like play , arrive and enter are regular, while verbs like sing , keep and go are irregular. Irregular verbs often preserve patterns that were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous; in rare cases, there are regular verbs that were irregular in past forms of the language. (For more details see English verbs and English irregular verbs .) Other types of irregular inflected form include irregular plural nouns, such as
12528-619: The exception of the teens, which are handled as plural; thus, 102 is dual, but 12 or 127 are not). In addition, in some Slavic languages, such as Polish, word stems are frequently modified by the addition or absence of endings, resulting in consonant and vowel alternation . Modern Standard Arabic (also called Literary Arabic) is an inflected language. It uses a system of independent and suffix pronouns classified by person and number and verbal inflections marking person and number. Suffix pronouns are used as markers of possession and as objects of verbs and prepositions. The tatweel (ـــ) marks where
12672-616: The feminine forms and inflects for three grammatical genders like Icelandic. However, in comparison to Icelandic, there are considerably fewer feminine forms left in the language. In comparison, Icelandic preserves almost all of the inflections of Old Norse and remains heavily inflected. It retains all the grammatical cases from Old Norse and is inflected for number and three different grammatical genders. The dual number forms are however almost completely lost in comparison to Old Norse. Unlike other Germanic languages, nouns are inflected for definiteness in all Scandinavian languages, like in
12816-523: The following case for Norwegian (nynorsk) : Adjectives and participles are also inflected for definiteness in all Scandinavian languages like in Proto-Germanic . Modern German remains moderately inflected, retaining four noun cases, although the genitive started falling into disuse in all but formal writing in Early New High German . The case system of Dutch , simpler than that of German,
12960-627: The forms or inflections of more than one word in a sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement . For example, in "the man jumps", "man" is a singular noun, so "jump" is constrained in the present tense to use the third person singular suffix "s". Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages . They can be highly inflected (such as Georgian or Kichwa ), moderately inflected (such as Russian or Latin ), weakly inflected (such as English ), but not uninflected (such as Chinese ). Languages that are so inflected that
13104-421: The future and conditional). Inflection is also present in adjective comparation and word derivation. Declensional endings depend on case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, vocative), number (singular, dual or plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and animacy (animate vs inanimate). Unusual in other language families, declension in most Slavic languages also depends on whether
13248-445: The help of a rubric, copy-editing, and helping translation . Writing technologies from different eras coexist easily in many homes and workplaces. During the course of a day or even a single episode of writing, for example, a writer might instinctively switch among a pencil, a touchscreen, a text-editor, a whiteboard, a legal pad, and adhesive notes as different purposes arise. As human societies emerged, collective motivations for
13392-612: The hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Such systems are called abjads , derived from the Arabic word for 'alphabet', or consonantaries . In most of the alphabets of India and Southeast Asia , vowels are indicated through diacritics or modification of the shape of the consonant. These are called abugidas . Some abugidas, such as Geʽez and the Canadian Aboriginal syllabics , are learned by children as syllabaries, and so are often called "syllabics". However, unlike true syllabaries, there
13536-422: The inflection in adpositional phrases. This means that these languages will have inflected adpositions. In Western Apache ( San Carlos dialect), the postposition -ká’ 'on' is inflected for person and number with prefixes: Traditional grammars have specific terms for inflections of nouns and verbs but not for those of adpositions . Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify
13680-510: The inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" → "dog- s "), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call- ed "). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with -s ), and the present participle (with -ing ). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with -er and -est respectively). There are eight regular inflectional affixes in
13824-595: The integrity of their roles. Many modern systems of government are organized and sanctified through written constitutions at the national and sometimes state or other organizational levels. Written rules and procedures typically guide the operations of the various branches, departments, and other bodies of government, which regularly produce reports and other documents as work products and to account for their actions. In addition to legislatures that draft and pass laws, these laws are administered by an executive branch , which can present further written regulations specifying
13968-471: The irregular nature of English spelling, ⟨ou⟩ can be pronounced at least nine different ways: /aʊ/ in out , /oʊ/ in soul , / uː / in soup , / ʌ / in touch , / ʊ / in could , / ɔː / in four , / ɜː / in journal , / ɒ / in cough , and / ə / in famous (See Spelling-to-sound correspondences ). In the other direction, / iː / can be spelled in at least 18~21 different ways: b e ( c e d e ), sk i ( mach i n e ), bologn
14112-418: The laws and how they are carried out. Governments at different levels also typically maintain written records on citizens concerning identities, life events such as births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, the granting of licenses for controlled activities, criminal charges, traffic offenses, and other penalties small and large, and tax liability and payments. Research undertaken in academic disciplines
14256-441: The learning of writing, and students may carry these particular associations long after leaving school. Alongside the writing that students read (in the forms of textbooks, assigned books, and other instructional materials as well as self-selected books) students do much writing within schools at all levels, on subject exams, in essays, in taking notes, in doing homework, and in formative and summative assessments . Some of this
14400-502: The letter ⟨t⟩ is pronounced by most speakers with aspiration [tʰ] at the beginning of words, this is never indicated in the spelling, and, indeed, this phonetic detail is probably not noticeable to the average native speaker not trained in phonetics. However, unlike some orthographies, English orthography often represents a very abstract underlying representation (or morphophonemic form) of English words. [T]he postulated underlying forms are systematically related to
14544-638: The ligatures have been generally replaced by the digraphs ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ ( encyclopaedia , diarrhoea ) in British English or just ⟨e⟩ ( encyclopedia , diarrhea ) in American English , though both spell some words with only ⟨e⟩ ( economy , ecology ) and others with ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ ( paean , amoeba , oedipal , Caesar ). In some cases, usage may vary; for instance, both encyclopedia and encyclopaedia are current in
14688-567: The majority having been excavated at Susa , an ancient city located east of the Tigris and between the Karkheh and Dez Rivers. The Proto-Elamite script is thought to have developed from early cuneiform (proto-cuneiform). The Proto-Elamite script consists of more than 1,000 signs and is thought to be partly logographic . Linear Elamite is a writing system attested in a few monumental inscriptions in Iran. It
14832-455: The masculine ( أنتم antum and هم hum ), whereas in Lebanese and Syrian Arabic, هم hum is replaced by هنّ hunna . In addition, the system known as ʾIʿrāb places vowel suffixes on each verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, according to its function within a sentence and its relation to surrounding words. The Uralic languages are agglutinative , following from
14976-496: The mid-18th century. It used to be pronounced /ʃiː/ , similar to the Norwegian pronunciation, but the increasing popularity of the sport after the mid-20th century helped the /skiː/ pronunciation replace it. There was also a period when the spelling of a small number of words was altered to make them conform to their perceived etymological origins. For example, ⟨b⟩ was added to debt (originally dette ) to link it to
15120-972: The mother tongue of the Romance languages, was highly inflected; nouns and adjectives had different forms according to seven grammatical cases (including five major ones) with five major patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues. There were four patterns of conjugation in six tenses, three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, plus the infinitive, participle, gerund, gerundive, and supine) and two voices (passive and active), all overtly expressed by affixes (passive voice forms were periphrastic in three tenses). The Baltic languages are highly inflected. Nouns and adjectives are declined in up to seven overt cases. Additional cases are defined in various covert ways. For example, an inessive case , an illative case , an adessive case and allative case are borrowed from Finnic. Latvian has only one overt locative case but it syncretizes
15264-706: The name Maria used to be pronounced like the name Mariah , but was changed to conform to this system. This only further complicates the spelling, however. On the one hand, words that retained anglicised spellings may be misread in a hyperforeign way. On the other hand, words that are respelled in a 'foreign' way may be misread as if they are English words, e.g. Muslim was formerly spelled Mooslim because of its original pronunciation. Commercial advertisers have also had an effect on English spelling. They introduced new or simplified spellings like lite instead of light , thru instead of through , and rucsac instead of rucksack . The spellings of personal names have also been
15408-406: The new spellings usually not judged to be entirely correct. However, such forms may gain acceptance if used enough. An example is the word miniscule , which still competes with its original spelling of minuscule , though this might also be because of analogy with the word mini . Inconsistencies and irregularities in English pronunciation and spelling have gradually increased in number throughout
15552-781: The normal English pronunciation rules. Moreover, in pâté , the acute accent is helpful to distinguish it from pate . Further examples of words sometimes retaining diacritics when used in English are: ångström —partly because its symbol is ⟨Å⟩ — appliqué , attaché , blasé , bric-à-brac , Brötchen , cliché , crème , crêpe , façade , fiancé(e) , flambé , jalapeño , naïve , naïveté , né(e) , papier-mâché , passé , piñata , protégé , résumé , risqué , and voilà . Italics , with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, adiós , belles-lettres , crème brûlée , pièce de résistance , raison d'être , and vis-à-vis . It
15696-553: The noun they modify or for which they substitute. Baltic verbs are inflected for tense, mood, aspect, and voice. They agree with the subject in person and number (not in all forms in modern Latvian). All Slavic languages make use of a high degree of inflection, typically having six or seven cases and three genders for nouns and adjectives. However, the overt case system has disappeared almost completely in modern Bulgarian and Macedonian . Most verb tenses and moods are also formed by inflection (however, some are periphrastic , typically
15840-570: The one that appears to have been best developed, and the only one to be deciphered, is the Maya script . The earliest inscription identified as Maya dates to the 3rd century BC. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing. In 2001, archaeologists discovered that there was a civilization in Central Asia that used writing c. 2000 BC . An excavation near Ashgabat ,
15984-411: The past indicative and subjunctive ( looked ), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative ( looks ), an inflected form for the present participle ( looking ), and an uninflected form for everything else ( look ). While the English possessive indicator 's (as in "Jennifer's book") is a remnant of the Old English genitive case suffix, it is now considered by syntacticians not to be
16128-447: The phonetic Hangul system is mainly used. Other logographic systems include cuneiform and Maya . A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables , typically a consonant followed by a vowel, or just a vowel alone. In some scripts more complex syllables (such as consonant-vowel-consonant, or consonant-consonant-vowel) may have dedicated glyphs. Phonetically similar syllables are not written similarly. For instance,
16272-415: The preceding ⟨c⟩ is pronounced / s / , rather than the more common value of ⟨c⟩ in word-final position as the sound / k / , such as in attic / ˈ æ t ɪ k / . ⟨e⟩ also often marks an altered pronunciation of a preceding vowel. In the pair mat and mate , the ⟨a⟩ of mat has the value / æ / , whereas the ⟨a⟩ of mate
16416-540: The reason for the difference is historical, and it was not introduced to resolve amibiguity. Nevertheless, many homophones remain that are unresolved by spelling (for example, the word bay has at least five fundamentally different meanings). Some letters in English provide information about the pronunciation of other letters in the word. Rollings (2004) uses the term "markers" for such letters. Letters may mark different types of information. For instance, ⟨e⟩ in once / ˈ w ʌ n s / indicates that
16560-583: The same sentence. However, these were generally much better guides to the then-pronunciation than modern English spelling is. For example, / ʌ / , normally written ⟨u⟩ , is spelled with an ⟨o⟩ in one , some , love , etc., due to Norman spelling conventions which prohibited writing ⟨u⟩ before ⟨m, n, v⟩ due to the graphical confusion that would result. ( ⟨n, u, v⟩ were written identically with two minims in Norman handwriting; ⟨w⟩
16704-446: The script to be logo-syllabic (typically syllabic scripts have about 50–100 signs whereas logographic scripts have a very large number of principal signs). Several scholars maintain that structural analysis indicates an agglutinative language underlies the script. The Proto-Sinaitic script, in which Proto-Canaanite is believed to have been first written, is attested as far back as the 19th century BC. The Phoenician writing system
16848-616: The semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word, such as by changing a noun to a verb. Distinctions between verbal moods are mainly indicated by derivational morphemes. Words are rarely listed in dictionaries on the basis of their inflectional morphemes (in which case they would be lexical items). However, they often are listed on the basis of their derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list readable and readability , words with derivational suffixes, along with their root read . However, no traditional English dictionary lists book as one entry and books as
16992-461: The service of temple, pharaonic, and military authorities. The hieroglyph system was always difficult to learn, but in later centuries was purposely made even more so, as this preserved the scribes' status. The world's oldest known alphabet appears to have been developed by Canaanite turquoise miners in the Sinai desert around the mid-19th century BC. Around 30 crude inscriptions have been found at
17136-469: The single morphemic form rather than to the surface phonological form. English orthography does not always provide an underlying representation; sometimes it provides an intermediate representation between the underlying form and the surface pronunciation. This is the case with the spelling of the regular plural morpheme, which is written as either - ⟨s⟩ (as in tat, tats and hat, hats ) or - ⟨es⟩ (as in glass, glasses ). Here,
17280-441: The spelling - ⟨s⟩ is pronounced either / s / or / z / (depending on the environment, e.g., tats / ˈ t æ t s / and tails / ˈ t eɪ l z / ) while - ⟨es⟩ is usually pronounced /ᵻz/ (e.g. classes /ˈklæsᵻz/ ). Thus, there are two different spellings that correspond to the single underlying representation | z | of the plural suffix and the three surface forms. The spelling indicates
17424-630: The suffix -s is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word. These two morphemes together form the inflected word cars . Words that are never subject to inflection are said to be invariant ; for example, the English verb must is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. Its categories can be determined only from its context. Languages that seldom make use of inflection, such as English , are said to be analytic . Analytic languages that do not make use of derivational morphemes , such as Standard Chinese , are said to be isolating . Requiring
17568-501: The syllable "ka" may look nothing like the syllable "ki", nor will syllables with the same vowels be similar. Syllabaries are best suited to languages with a relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. Other languages that use syllabic writing include Mycenaean Greek ( Linear B ), Cherokee , the Ndjuka creole language of Suriname , and the Vai language of Liberia . An alphabet
17712-701: The term cuneiform ), at first only for logograms , but by the 29th century BC also for phonetic elements. Around 2700 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian. About that time, Mesopotamian cuneiform became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. This script was adapted to another Mesopotamian language, the East Semitic Akkadian ( Assyrian and Babylonian ) c. 2600 BC , and then to others such as Elamite , Hattian , Hurrian and Hittite . Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian . With
17856-523: The use of identical sequences for spelling different sounds ( ove r , ove n , m ove ). Furthermore, English no longer makes any attempt to anglicise the spellings of loanwords , but preserves the foreign spellings, even when they do not follow English spelling conventions like the Polish ⟨cz⟩ in Czech (rather than *Check ) or the Norwegian ⟨fj⟩ in fjord (although fiord
18000-399: The various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most recognised variations being British and American spelling , and its overall uniformity helps facilitate international communication. On the other hand, it also adds to the discrepancy between the way English
18144-503: The verb stem, verb form, noun, or preposition is placed. Arabic regional dialects (e.g. Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic), used for everyday communication, tend to have less inflection than the more formal Literary Arabic. For example, in Jordanian Arabic, the second- and third-person feminine plurals ( أنتنّ antunna and هنّ hunna ) and their respective unique conjugations are lost and replaced by
18288-583: The way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols ⟨a, e, i, o, u⟩ have in the International Phonetic Alphabet . As a result, there is a somewhat regular system of pronouncing "foreign" words in English, and some borrowed words have had their spelling changed to conform to this system. For example, Hindu used to be spelled Hindoo , and
18432-524: The ways in which writers have framed the experience of writing with such tools as compared with the pen or pencil. Advancements in natural language processing and natural language generation have resulted in software capable of producing certain forms of formulaic writing (e.g., weather forecasts and brief sports reporting) without the direct involvement of humans after initial configuration or, more commonly, to be used to support writing processes such as generating initial drafts, producing feedback with
18576-491: The word vague , ⟨e⟩ marks the long ⟨a⟩ sound, but ⟨u⟩ keeps the ⟨g⟩ hard rather than soft. Doubled consonants usually indicate that the preceding vowel is pronounced short. For example, the doubled ⟨t⟩ in batted indicates that the ⟨a⟩ is pronounced / æ / , while the single ⟨t⟩ of bated gives /eɪ/ . Doubled consonants only indicate any lengthening or gemination of
18720-410: The word is a noun or an adjective. Slovene and Sorbian languages use a rare third number, (in addition to singular and plural numbers) known as dual (in case of some words dual survived also in Polish and other Slavic languages). Modern Russian, Serbian and Czech also use a more complex form of dual , but this misnomer applies instead to numbers 2, 3, 4, and larger numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4 (with
18864-479: The work. Prior to official publication, these documents are typically read and evaluated by peer review from appropriate experts, who determine whether the work is of sufficient value and quality to be published. Publication does not establish the claims or findings of work as being authoritatively true, only that they are worth the attention of other specialists. As the work appears in review articles, handbooks, textbooks, or other aggregations, and others cite it in
19008-623: Was a case of cultural diffusion . Archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat determined the link between previously uncategorized clay "tokens", the oldest of which have been found in the Zagros region of Iran, and cuneiform, the first known writing. Around 8000 BC, Mesopotamians began using clay tokens to count their agricultural and manufactured goods. Later they began placing these tokens inside large, hollow clay containers (bulla, or globular envelopes) which were then sealed. The quantity of tokens in each container came to be expressed by impressing, on
19152-417: Was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic , Faroese or German . Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the Old English inflectional system. Modern English is considered a weakly inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and its regular verbs have only four forms: an inflected form for
19296-505: Was adapted from the Proto-Canaanite script sometime before the 14th century BC, which in turn borrowed principles of representing phonetic information from Egyptian hieroglyphs . This writing system was an odd sort of syllabary in which only consonants are represented. This script was adapted by the Greeks , who adapted certain consonantal signs to represent their vowels. The Cumae alphabet ,
19440-491: Was derived c. 3200 BC from this method of keeping accounts. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, the Mesopotamians were using a triangular-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay to record numbers. This system was gradually augmented with using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted by means of pictographs . Round and sharp styluses were gradually replaced for writing by wedge-shaped styluses (hence
19584-754: Was formerly common in American English to use a diaeresis to indicate a hiatus , e.g. coöperate , daïs , and reëlect . The New Yorker and Technology Review magazines still use it for this purpose, even as general use became much rarer. Instead, modern orthography generally prefers no mark ( cooperate ) or a hyphen ( co-operate ) for a hiatus between two morphemes in a compound word. By contrast, use of diaereses in monomorphemic loanwords such as naïve and Noël remains relatively common. In poetry and performance arts, accent marks are occasionally used to indicate typically unstressed syllables that should be stressed when read for dramatic or prosodic effect. This
19728-424: Was formerly the most common spelling). In early Middle English, until roughly 1400, most imports from French were respelled according to English rules (e.g. bataille – battle , bouton – button , but not double , or trouble ). Instead of loans being respelled to conform to English spelling standards, sometimes the pronunciation changes as a result of pressure from the spelling, e.g. ski , adopted from Norwegian in
19872-608: Was not until the 12th to 9th centuries, however, that the alphabet took hold and became widely used. The Cascajal Block , a stone slab with 3,000-year-old proto-writing, was discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz and is an example of the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere, preceding the oldest Zapotec writing by approximately 500 years. It is thought to be Olmec . Of several pre-Columbian scripts in Mesoamerica ,
20016-514: Was spelled gost in Middle English , until the Flemish spelling pattern was unintentionally substituted, and happened to be accepted. Most of the spelling conventions in Modern English were derived from the phonemic spelling of a variety of Middle English , and generally do not reflect the sound changes that have occurred since the late 15th century (such as the Great Vowel Shift ). Despite
20160-486: Was swept away by the Norman Conquest , and English itself was supplanted in some spheres by Norman French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, and kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle English is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled in different ways, sometimes even in
20304-417: Was used for a very brief period during the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BC. It is often claimed that Linear Elamite is a syllabic writing system derived from Proto-Elamite, although this cannot be proven since Linear-Elamite has not been deciphered. Several scholars have attempted to decipher the script, most notably Walther Hinz [ de ] and Piero Meriggi . The Elamite cuneiform script
20448-501: Was used from about 2500 to 331 BC, and was adapted from the Akkadian cuneiform. At any given point within this period, the Elamite cuneiform script consisted of about 130 symbols, and over this entire period only 206 total signs were used. This is far fewer than most other cuneiform scripts. Cretan hieroglyphs are found on artifacts of Crete (early-to-mid-2nd millennium BC, MM I to MM III, overlapping with Linear A from MM IIA at
20592-647: Was used in the Aegean Islands ( Kea , Kythera , Melos , Thera ), and the Greek mainland ( Laconia ) from c. 18th century to 1450 BC; and Linear B was used in Crete ( Knossos ), and mainland ( Pylos , Mycenae , Thebes , Tiryns ) from c. 1375 to 1200 BC. Indus script refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Indus Valley Civilization (which spanned modern-day Pakistan and North India ) used between 2600 and 1900 BC. Despite attempts at decipherments and claims, it
20736-843: Was written as two ⟨u⟩ letters; ⟨m⟩ was written with three minims, hence ⟨mm⟩ looked like ⟨vun, nvu, uvu⟩ , etc.). Similarly, spelling conventions also prohibited final ⟨v⟩ . Hence the identical spellings of the three different vowel sounds in love , move , and cove are due to ambiguity in the Middle English spelling system, not sound change. In 1417, Henry V began using English, which had no standardised spelling, for official correspondence instead of Latin or French which had standardised spelling, e.g. Latin had one spelling for right ( rectus ), Old French as used in English law had six and Middle English had 77. This motivated writers to standardise English spelling, an effort which lasted about 500 years. Writing Writing
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