By Max L'
As we know, orthography can vary significantly throughout the natural evolution of a language. Primarily, alterations are made in orthography to reflect phonological changes. Let us take English as an example. Before the Great Vowel Shift which occurred between the 15th and early 17th centuries, we see words such as “bout” spelled as “boot” due to a stark difference in pronunciation. In Russian, we also saw this phenomenon when the USSR introduced significant orthographical reforms. For one, the letter ѣ (yat), which was pronounced identically to е (ye), was completely removed and replaced. Scholars posit that the phonological distinction between the yat and the ye had disappeared potentially even before the 11th century; however, it had remained in use due to the influence of Church Slavonic. Similarly, the three letters и, і, and ѵ, whose phonological distinctions had long disappeared by the 20th century, were replaced universally with и. The hard sign ъ (твердый знак), which was placed after every hard consonant ending a word, was also rendered redundant, although it is still used if it is contained in the stem. Previously, the hard sign had represented different vowel phenomes under different contexts, but in modern Russian, it had lost almost all phonological value, becoming essentially a silent letter.
Despite phonological changes being paramount to catalysing orthographical reforms, there are also a multitude of other factors contributing to the orthographical rules of a language. Let us again take English as an example. From the time of the Normans, English has taken on an extremely significant amount of loan words from French, Latin, and Greek. Despite all of the phonological changes which had occurred from then till now, the spelling of these loan words has remained constant, mostly preserving their original roots. This can be primarily attributed to the important role these languages played in Academia and also the upper echelons of society. These two demographic groups had immense influence over the written language considering the low historical literacy rate. Thus, these lone words usually have phenomes represented differently from words of Germanic origin in English. For example, -tion occurs exclusively in French loan words. If the same sound were to be represented in words of Germanic origin, the spelling would most likely be -shun instead.
In Thai, loanwords have played an even larger role in its orthography. Due to Buddhism, Sanskrit was held in high regard in Thailand. Analogously, Thai shares a significant portion of its lexicon with Sanskrit. In English, the influence of Romance languages along with Greek simply affected spelling, but in Thai, Sanskrit has actually affected the writing script itself. In the Thai abugida, there are many letters representing identical phenomes, with the only difference in their usage being the original spelling of the loanword in Sanskrit. For example, the two letters “ธ” and “ท” share the exact same pronunciation, which would usually result in one being favoured over the other in other languages.
In Arabic, religion was the most significant to causing orthographical reform. Previously, the script contained virtually no diacritics, leading to ambiguity. This was deemed adequate in most cases, as context usually provided the means to distinguish between different possibilities. In many ways, this is similar to Korean, whereby a written word could have many different meanings. Previously, there was no ambiguity due to the use of Hanja (Chinese characters); however, the popularisation of Hangul, which is alpha syllabic rather than logographic, introduced these ambiguities. This form of semantic ambiguity was mostly tolerated in the Arabic diaspora until the debut of Islam. Muslims believe that the Qur’an ُ ْرآن) ْق ال (represented the literal word of Allah (God). Thus, early Islamic scribes believed that a precise written record was imperative, and an extensive system of diacritics was developed to eliminate all possible ambiguity. These same diacritics are still in use today. In some sense, we can also observe an analogous effect in Korean. Hangul is considered appropriate under most circumstances, yet every statute or law still contains a version written in mixed script (Hanja and Hangul) to eliminate all possible ambiguity. A law having many semantic meanings will not serve to be beneficial to society!
Overall, phonological considerations definitely play a colossal role in the orthography of a language. Yet, it is extremely interesting when orthographical rules are dictated by sociological factors instead. This is because we are able to then deduce many things about a culture in regard to its history and customs
