Editing Orthography (section)

=== Defective orthographies ===
An orthography based on a correspondence to phonemes may sometimes lack characters to represent all the phonemic distinctions in the language. This is called a [[defective orthography]]. An example in English is the lack of any indication of [[stress (linguistics)|stress]].{{citation needed|date=May 2024}} Another is the [[digraph (orthography)|digraph]] {{gph|th}}, which represents two different phonemes (as in ''then'' and ''thin'') and replaced the old letters {{gph|[[ð]]}} and {{gph|[[þ]]}}. A more systematic example is that of [[abjad]]s like the [[Arabic alphabet|Arabic]] and [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew]] alphabets, in which 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 {{gph|sh}} and {{gph|ch}} in English, where pairs of letters represent single sounds), [[diacritic]]s (like the [[caron]] on the letters {{gph|š}} and {{gph|č}}, which represent those same sounds in [[Czech language|Czech]]), or the addition of completely new symbols (as some languages have introduced the letter {{gph|[[w]]}} to the Latin alphabet) or of symbols from another alphabet, such as the [[rune]] {{gph|[[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, 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.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bulley |first1=Michael |title=Spelling reform – a lesson from the Greeks: Learning from the Greeks about English spellings |journal=English Today |date=December 2011 |volume=27 |issue=4 |pages=71–72 |doi=10.1017/S0266078411000575 }}</ref>