Orthography

An alphabet is a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols, called letters, to more or less represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units.

A phoneme () is a set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial–gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are studied under phonology, a branch of linguistics (a discipline encompassing language, writing, speech and related matters).

Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of symbols, often specifically those of a written language, by means of sight or touch.

An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.

thumb|class=skin-invert-image|Latin letter A with multiple diacritics

thumb|Various glyphs representing lower case letter in various typefaces and as single- and double-storey; they are allographs of the same [[grapheme|class=skin-invert-image]]

thumb|upright=0.7|Standard Chinese|Mandarin Chinese, like many languages, can be romanized in a number of ways; above: Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters meaning Chinese, and romanization systems Hanyu Pinyin, [[Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Wade-Giles and Yale for those characters.]]

thumb|400px|Venn diagram showing the relationships between homographs (yellow) and related linguistic concepts|class=skin-invert-image

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.

Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words.

distinctive property of a letter in a bicameral alphabet (most notably the Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic ones); piece of information whether a letter grapheme is taller "upper case" or lower "lower case"

conventional order in which CJKV characters should be written

19th and 20th century dispute in Greece about whether the popular language (Demotic) or a cultivated imitation of Ancient Greek (katharevousa) should be official; settled in favour of the former

orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the phonemes of the language

orthographical conventions of Greek, modern and historical

thumb| rendered with or without a looptail are allographs of each other|class=skin-invert-image

set of letters designed as the basis for Latin alphabets for the languages of Africa

right|thumb|The capital letter "A" in the Latin alphabet, followed by its lowercase equivalent, in sans serif and [[serif typefaces respectively|class=skin-invert-image]]

transcription method that employs the standard spelling system of each target language

the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter-phoneme correspondence

using visually similar characters in domain names to deceive users

non-standard spelling emphasizing a pronunciation

A unicase or unicameral script is a writing script that has no separate cases for its letters. Semitic abjads such as Hebrew and Arabic, Brahmic scripts such as Devanagari, Tamil and Thai, CJK scripts (Chinese characters, Hangul and Kana) and the Iberian and Georgian scripts are unicase writing systems, while scripts like Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian are bicameral, as they have two cases for each letter, e.g. B and b, Б and б, Β and β, or Բ and բ. Individual characters can also be called unicameral if they are used as letters with a generally bicameral alphabet but have only one form fo

The predictable and systematic relationship between letters and spoken sounds.

An akshara () is a consonant letter together with any vowel diacritics in a Brahmic script. It is a term used in the traditional grammar of the Sanskrit language and in the Vedanta school of Indian philosophy.

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