Presentation On Spelling

The English

Writing System Chapter Six

The origin of writing….. Writing first emerged from early people’s efforts to record their experiences and to leave messages for others. The writings of early people were on walls of caves and were marks carved in stone.

The writing systems (orthographies)… Evolved over time An orthography is a code that consists of a set of graphemes (written symbols that stand for a word, syllable, or speech sound of a language) . Types of orthographies: • Logographic, chinese, syllabic, and alphabetic.

The most wide spread type of writing is alphabetic… This derives from ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman languages. The English language has many-to-many correspondence between sounds and letters. Other languages such as Finnish and Spanish have one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds.

Characteristics (changes) in the English Language:  Sound Changes: The pronunciations of sounds and words have changed over the centuries, but their spellings have not always changed accordingly.  Borrowed Word Changes: Taking words from other social societies. Many invasions and occupations of the British Isles as well as British exploration and colonization around the world have made English the “borrowingest” language in the world. Numerous words from other languages have been added to English without changing their spellings.

Characteristics continuted… Etymological Changes: The origin of words. An example of this type of change come from the influence of classical studies during the Renaissance. The writers wanted to give classical languages a rebirth, so they resurrected some Latin spellings.

A way to approach teaching the English Language System  Learning about the complex orthography of English not only provides a fascinating history lesson, but it also suggests the importance of learning about the relationship between words and meaning, rather then a simply writing single words in isolation.  The most important thing to remember about spelling is that it is a graphic representations of writing. And writing is for constructing and communicating meaning.