Ghoti: Orthographic Literacy in Focus: Representation by Samejon (2015)

Orthography is sometimes confused with writing system and script. Consequently, this section will start by distinguishing these three terms.

There are two types of writing systems: morphographic, which is logographic, and phonographic, which is phonemic. Along the meaning-to-sound continuum, a morphographic writing system represents idea plus sound in their written characters, i.e., Mandarin. The second type, phonographic, consists of subtypes such as: syllabic or moraic, which is written according to syllable vowel plus consonant, e.g. Devanagari; alphabetic is according to phoneme vowel or consonant, e.g., Greek; abugida is according to phoneme vowel diacritic or consonant; and abjad is according to phoneme consonant only, e.g. Arabic (Peckham, 2015; Li, McEntee-Atalianis, & Lorch, 2014).

While a writing system is particularly concerned with the written abstraction of meaning-to-symbol or sound-to-symbol identification, orthography encompasses a writing system being governed by language-specific conventions, e.g. sound and formation rules and variation (cf. Wei et al., 2014). A script then is the “alphabet” of a writing system. To this effect, Koda (2012) provided this paradigm:

To illustrate, English and Russian writing systems are both alphabetic, but they differ in their scripts—the former employs the Roman script and the latter uses the Cyrillic. English and Spanish are alphabetic, both employing the Roman script, but differ orthographically in spelling conventions. (p. 1)

            Multilingualism, being the norm in the global landscape, has brought studies of literacy to give great interest to bi-, tri-, and multi-literacy. In the process of acquiring literacy in another language, emerging literates are immediately confronted with a different orthography. As mentioned earlier, the second language (L2) or target language (TL) may share similar scripts but can be proven novel via the L2’s orthography. It is sensible to ask at this point: what then would be the bases of such variation in orthography? Frost (1994; 2012) may well give us clues through the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (ODH).

According to the ODH (Frost, 2012), languages can be classified as having deep or shallow orthography. A language with deep orthography has a relatively distant grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) where a word should be processed through their morphology. Also, a deep orthography’s letter-to-sound representation is not straightforward. In a playful note, “ghoti” may be read the way you read “fish” if English would remain straight-out faithful to the sound of “gh” in “enough”, “o” in “women”, and “ti” in “nation”. Retrieval of such sound repertoire is possible through mental awareness, or simply, familiarity of the language’s phonology. In contrast, a language with shallow orthography has strong grapheme-phoneme identification. Sample languages below will show us how these concepts are embodied in natural languages.

Chinese has limited phonemes and in order to represent their language they added tones that are codified in their writing system. This has not simply provided readers of Chinese a means for retrieving pronunciation but meaning as well. The case of Japanese is quite different. Having borrowed the writing system of Chinese, Japanese developed ‘kanji’ to disambiguate homophones and further developed hiragana and katakana. Broadly, both hiragana and katakana function as their phonographic scripts. Finnish has a very transparent orthography while English and Hebrew, on the other hand, have a deep orthography.

What we can learn from these orthographic variances is that: orthography accommodates phonology and meaning using minimal orthographic units for processing (Frost, 2012; p. 267) primarily directed to the access of a particular group. Minimal in this sense is the optimization of symbols to facilitate efficient representation and retrieval. However, this is not the only means of how a specific orthography is represented or developed. With this in mind, it is imperative to mention Cahill (2014) who explores the non-linguistic factors in the development of orthography and Sebba (2015) who traces script alternations brought by the events in a language group’s history. Nevertheless, this multimodal/social aspect of orthographic representations deviates from the intentions of this paper, thus, such views deliberately merits a separate paper.

While conventions across cultures develop specific orthography, this difference can mean that bi-, tri- or multiliteracy is something complex but, ultimately, not impossible. At present, modern reflections offer insights as to how literacy, in view of differences in orthographies, can be facilitated. The next section will deal with these developments.