Phonemic orthography in the context of "Alphabetic principle"

In linguistics, romanization or romanisation is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, for representing the spoken word, and combinations of both. Transcription methods can be subdivided into phonemic transcription, which records the phonemes or units of semantic meaning in speech, and more strict phonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision.

Functional illiteracy consists of reading and writing skills that are inadequate "to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level". Those who read and write only in a language other than the predominant language of their environs may also be considered functionally illiterate in the predominant language. Functional illiteracy is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or write complete, correctly spelled sentences in any language. The opposite of functional illiteracy is functional literacy, literacy levels that are adequate for everyday purposes, and adequate reading comprehension, the ability to read collections of words (such as sentences and documents) and comprehend most or all of their meaning.

The characteristics of functional illiteracy vary from one culture to another, as some cultures require more advanced reading and writing skills than do others. In languages with phonemic spelling, functional illiteracy might be defined simply as reading too slowly for practical use, an inability to effectively use dictionaries and written manuals, and other factors. Sociological research has demonstrated that countries with lower levels of functional illiteracy among their adult populations tend to be those with the highest levels of scientific literacy among the lower stratum of young people nearing the end of their formal academic studies. This correspondence suggests that the capacity of schools to ensure students attain the functional literacy required to comprehend the basic texts and documents associated with competent citizenship contributes to a society's level of civic literacy.

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 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.

Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Spanish punctuation uniquely includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩ ⟨¡⟩.

Spanish uses capital letters much less often than English; they are not used on adjectives derived from proper nouns (e.g. francés, español, portugués from Francia, España, and Portugal, respectively) and book titles capitalize only the first word (e.g. La rebelión de las masas).

Gaj's Latin alphabet (Serbo-Croatian: Gajeva latinica / Гајева латиница, pronounced [ɡâːjeva latǐnit͡sa]), also known as abeceda (Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic: абецеда, pronounced [abet͡sěːda]) or gajica (Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic: гајица, pronounced [ɡǎjit͡sa]), is the form of the Latin script used for writing all four standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. It contains 27 individual letters and 3 digraphs. Each letter (including digraphs) represents one Serbo-Croatian phoneme, yielding a highly phonemic orthography. It closely corresponds to the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet.

The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835 during the Illyrian movement in ethnically Croatian parts of the Austrian Empire. It was largely based on Jan Hus's Czech alphabet and was meant to serve as a unified orthography for three Croat-populated kingdoms within the Austrian Empire at the time, namely Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia, and their three dialect groups, Kajkavian, Chakavian and Shtokavian, which historically utilized different spelling rules. The alphabet's final form was defined in the late 19th century.

The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), beginning in southern England and having influenced effectively all dialects of English today. Through this extensive vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels altered. Some consonant sounds also changed, specifically becoming silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is occasionally used to include these consonantal changes.

The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries; the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations.

Thaana, Tãna, Taana or Tāna ( ތާނަ ) is the present writing system of the Maldivian language spoken in the Maldives. Thaana has characteristics of both an abugida (diacritics, vowel-killer strokes) and a true alphabet (all vowels are written), with consonants derived from indigenous and Arabic numerals, and vowels derived from the vowel diacritics of the Arabic abjad. Maldivian orthography in Thaana is largely phonemic.