Talk:Orthographic depth

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Italian[edit]

Italian orthography is a bad example. It ignores syntactic gemination although having double consonants. And even most Italians do not know when to pronounce é, è, ó, ò since it's only marked in very few cases. You have to look it up in a dictionary or learn Latin. Then there are issues with voiced s, z. Recently, local dialects are not frowned upon anymore, so the standard is in danger. How can there be orthographic depth when people are fighting over how to pronounce words containing written e, o, s, z? --2.245.90.251 (talk) 17:45, 2 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Italian is a bad example, but not so bad. Even french is not so bad. It is very complex to find a rule for convert grapheme into phoneme, still it exists. Have you try to pronunce english? No rules (constant rules). Bengali language? Traditinal spelling, modern pronunciation) Arabic? (No vowels). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.18.250.181 (talk) 23:28, 15 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If you want an example of an orthografy much cleaner than English, i suppose Italian is a good example, because its spelling is much more transparent than English. (Not that that's saying much!) However, Italian is not an ideal example; as you pointed out, its spelling is somewhat defectiv in that some fonemic features are not denoted, or not consistently denoted, on paper. A very good example of a highly transparent orthografy is Finnish; its script has a near--one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 22:31, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I added,[edit]

in a new section “See also”, a link to “English-language spelling reform”. I felt this was very relevant because the extreme orthografic depth of English, in other words, an inexcusably poor correlation between spelling and pronunciation, creates a strong argument in favor of spelling reform. Okay?--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 22:35, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds phine. Klbrain (talk) 20:52, 11 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Cite[edit]

I think this article needs additional citations for verification. There are about five of them, but i think there should be more, especially since they seem to cite books rather than websites; and websites are more readily accessible to the Wikipedia user, than books.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 22:43, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Criticisms of the terminology[edit]

The term "deep orthography" suggests some type of superiority of "deep" ortographies over the "shallow" ones, which isn't the case. Surely it's been criticised in the literature? Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 21:39, 23 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if it's terminology, but the article contradicts itself. The beginning of the article discusses *only* pronunciation, but the rest of it veers off into grammar. For instance, it says that Hebrew is deep like English; that cannot be true if the Hebrew includes the vowels, which makes it perfectly phonetic. Only if you include grammatical issues would that make sense.

Something needs to be fixed. MikeR613 (talk) 12:19, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Confusing explanation of the definition[edit]

The explanation in the first 2 paragraphs is confusing. First the definition is given: "The orthographic depth of an alphabetic orthography indicates the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence." This is correct. However, the rest of the first 2 paragraphs only refers to one direction, spelling-to-pronunciation. The concept also includes the other direction, pronunciation-to-spelling, but this is not mentioned in the explanation. (If it only took into account the spelling-to-pronunciation direction, French would be a beautiful example of shallow ortography...)

I don't feel up to amending the entry, but I suggest that someone more knowledgeable than me should do so.

Sciamanna (talk) 19:08, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thai has deep orthography?[edit]

Non-linguist native Thai speaker who just learned about orthographic depth here, can someone please provide a reference citing Thai being orthographically deep? That doesn't sound right to me but as I'm no expert, I'm keen to see ref. Thanks. 180.150.38.67 (talk) 11:33, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

From the article by Thomas John Hudak in "The World's Major Languages", the method of writing tones is complex and confusing for those who aren't used to it, but the system is not indicated to be "deep" in other ways... AnonMoos (talk) 09:14, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway, as a native Vietnamese speaker who can speak Thai sentences, I give these two articles to you:

Also:

Thai words that are pronounced the same but spelt different, along with meanings in parentheses
First word	Second word	Paiboon transcription
ย่า (paternal grandmother)	หญ้า (grass)	yâa
ไม่ (no)	ไหม้ (to burn)	mâi
ลัก (to steal)	ลักษณ์ (characteristic)	lák
อาจ (maybe)	อาตม์ (being)	àat

Quang, Bùi Huy (talk) 11:39, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]