Question - Languages with inconsistent spelling systems?

[Gulliver]

Hello

I'm trying to find an example of a language with a consistently inconsistent spelling system, if any exist. English has accepted inconsistencies, of a geographical or social nature (jail/gaol, color/colour, -ise/-ize).

Are there any languages that have, or have had, consistently inconsistent spelling?

Cornish is an example, because it was mostly written with an English orthography that was bent into shape to fit Cornish sounds (<ee> for /i/ being pretty good evidence for this.

Ta

[Astraios]

L/Dakota is. The orthography I use is only officially used in certain places, and other places where L/Dakota is spoken tend to use ones based on English or on horrible orthographies that the missionaries came up with.

Wabláwa háŋtaŋhaŋš lé ištámaza hé é čha uŋmášipi. Ítoye kiŋ uŋpšíža uŋ paíčoȟ iyékiye.
Wablawa hantaans le istamaza hee ca onmasi pi. Itoye ki onpsija on paicoh ieki e.
Wablawa hantanhansh le ishtamaza hee-cha unmashi-pi. Itoye-kin unpshija-on paichoh iyekie.

That sort of thing.

[----]

I guess you could say Tibetan, the orthography has been very conservative and so there's almost no changes from Old Tibetan at all in the native orthography. That's why in Wylie transliteration, you get words like mkhregs that are pronounced [tʂʰɛʔ]. Also u and y, o and ø, a and ɛ, are never distinguished in the native script, which gets really annoying. You can somewhat predict it but it's irregular and as far as I've seen there's no real rule for when it happens (or doesn't).

[Herr Dunkel]

Hello

I'm trying to find an example of a language with a consistently inconsistent spelling system, if any exist. English has accepted inconsistencies, of a geographical or social nature (jail/gaol, color/colour, -ise/-ize).

Are there any languages that have, or have had, consistently inconsistent spelling?

Cornish is an example, because it was mostly written with an English orthography that was bent into shape to fit Cornish sounds (<ee> for /i/ being pretty good evidence for this.

Ta

Phonological Chinese could theoretically be this, though.
I don't know any actual examples, since writing's hard anyway, even without a gatrillion ways to write /faɪə/

[Legion]

What kind of inconsistencies are you looking for?

French has plently of inconsistencies in the area of sound/graphy correspondence. And I am not talking about the mute endings and many ways to write a sound, but about spelling that are actually inconsistent with the general rule.

<s> is a frequent offender; you get <s> which are /z/ in unexcepted environments (déshabiller /dezabije/, transi /tRA~zi/, Alsace /alzas/), <ss> that do not trigger vocalization of a preceding <e> (dessus /d@sy/, ressortir /r@sORtiR/; see also <restructurer> /R@stRyktyRe/ in front of <restaurer> /REstore/); it's hard to know where it will be pronounced or mute word-finally; you get pairs like <absurde> /apsyRd/ but <subside> /sybzid/, etc.

[Legion]

Also u and y, o and ø, a and ɛ, are never distinguished in the native script, which gets really annoying. You can somewhat predict it but it's irregular and as far as I've seen there's no real rule for when it happens (or doesn't).

From what I've seen vowel fronting is triggered by a following orthographical coronal consonant. Tibetan spelling is complex and dated, but it hardly seems *inconsistent*.

[----]

From what I've seen vowel fronting is triggered by a following orthographical coronal consonant. Tibetan spelling is complex and dated, but it hardly seems *inconsistent*.

I thought so too, but I've seen a couple words without that but were pronounced with fronting of the vowel anyway.

[Gulliver]

What kind of inconsistencies are you looking for?

Sorry, I thought my examples made it clear! It seems not. Astraios' example is probably better than mine.

Either languages where there are two - or more - semi-standard orthographies, or a free-for-all approach to spelling where spellings are acceptable as long as they are comprehensible.

[Herr Dunkel]

What kind of inconsistencies are you looking for?

Sorry, I thought my examples made it clear! It seems not. Astraios' example is probably better than mine.

Either languages where there are two - or more - semi-standard orthographies, or a free-for-all approach to spelling where spellings are acceptable as long as they are comprehensible.

Aah, whyn't you say so?
Bavarian is ripe!
The semi-official orthography of Bavarian assumes a vowel inventory of /a æ ɛ e ø i y ɑ ɔ u/ which it (AFAIR) transcribes as <a à e è ö i ü å o u>, sometimes written as <a ä e e ö i ü o o u> while dialects that have an inventory such as my /a ɛ e i ɑ o u/ would ideally be transcribed as <a à/ä e i å o u>, when it is often transcribed as <a e e i o o u> - which skewers up the point.
The consonants are pretty much standardised, I guess.

[zompist]

Quechua, where there is a fight between people who prefer a Spanish-based orthography and those who like a more phonemic one, to name just one axis. Whether to use Cuzco or Ayacucho dialect is also a big issue.

[Dewrad]

Hello

I'm trying to find an example of a language with a consistently inconsistent spelling system, if any exist. English has accepted inconsistencies, of a geographical or social nature (jail/gaol, color/colour, -ise/-ize).

Are there any languages that have, or have had, consistently inconsistent spelling?

Cornish is an example, because it was mostly written with an English orthography that was bent into shape to fit Cornish sounds (<ee> for /i/ being pretty good evidence for this.

Ta

Well, if you've thought of Cornish you should also get Manx for free. That's pretty much exactly the same situation as Cornish. Similar is Romani, which aside from at least two competing standard orthographies, tends to make use of conventions from the local national language. So you can get stuff like /ʀomani tʃʰib/ written as <ghomani chhib>, <rromani chib>, <řomani čhib>, <rromani ćhib> etc.

[----]

The Southeastern Asian languages, with their large vowel inventories, tend to have a few different romanizations in use per language. I think one Khmer romanization used <œ̆> for /ɨ/.

[Ser]

Are there any languages that have, or have had, consistently inconsistent spelling?

Either languages where there are two - or more - semi-standard orthographies, or a free-for-all approach to spelling where spellings are acceptable as long as they are comprehensible.

I think it's the other way, the free-for-all-spelling-as-long-as-you-get-your-point-across system has been the rule for most languages until recent times with this new social necessity to standardize it and the formation of institutions that gave themselves power to dictate spelling (language academies, certain dictionary-making companies e.g. Merriam-Webster or the OED in English).

At least, this is or has been the case with English, Spanish, French, Written Arabic, Mandarin/written Chinese of all times, Cantonese...

[Bob Johnson]

Mandarin/written Chinese of all times, Cantonese...

Yeah, alternate kanji in Japanese probably counts -- with sufficient context you don't even have to write a homophone -- I imagine written Chinese it's similar.

[Ziz]

What kind of inconsistencies are you looking for?

Sorry, I thought my examples made it clear! It seems not. Astraios' example is probably better than mine.

Either languages where there are two - or more - semi-standard orthographies, or a free-for-all approach to spelling where spellings are acceptable as long as they are comprehensible.

That's the case with Hebrew. During the Haskalah and the earlier stages of language revival in Mandate Palestine, spelling was officially based on Biblical norms, which is very compact and irregular and doesn't use nearly as many matres lectionis (י y for /i/ sounds, ו w for /u o/ sounds, and א/ה ʔ, h for /e a/ at the end of words) as later standards. Naturally, people ignored them and used the matres frequently, just as in Mishnaic Hebrew. Eventually, they came up with two systems of spelling: כתיב מלא ktiv male ("full spelling") vs. כתיב חסר ktiv ḥaser ("deficient spelling"). The former of these is "fuller" because it makes more frequent use of the matres, while the latter is based more on Classical spellings, but uses ניקוד niqqud (~diacritics to indicate vowels). You can mix the two systems as well; you can write in full spelling while still using vowel pointing, or you can partially vowelize words to disambiguate between two similarly written words. Some words, however, are written irregularly to preserve the appearance of common words and/or disambiguate between homophones (לא "not" vs. לו "to him," both pronounced /lo/), or because they're Biblical (יעקב /jaʕakov/ "Jacob" instead of יעקוב*), or both (שלמה /ʃloˈmo/ "Solomon" vs. שלומו "his peace, his health").

There's also the case of using an א instead of a more expected י or ו, like in תאמר /tomar/ "you will say" or ראשון /riʃon/ "first," but this is mostly to make sure that the root is plainly identifiable (א.מ.ר for the first and ר.א.ש for the second).

[Nortaneous]

The Southeastern Asian languages, with their large vowel inventories, tend to have a few different romanizations in use per language. I think one Khmer romanization used <œ̆> for /ɨ/.

If romanizations count, it should probably be mentioned that it is two thousand fucking twelve and there still isn't a goddamn standard for transliterating Arabic.

(There are probably regional differences in what people actually use, but I don't know them.)

[Niedokonany]

Polish, late XIX/early XX century - Warsaw Marja, Julja, Francja, Anglja Kraków Marya, Francya, Julia, Anglia

the writing of j/i/y to denote the phoneme /j/ has always been a bone of contention in modern era Polish; earlier stages tended to use i syllable initially and y syllable finally , and in those positions it was generally replaced by <j> when it became usual do distinguish it from <i>, after a consonant a big mess continued well into the XX century, though. Needless to say, I find the current rules still retarded.

Warsaw móc, biec Kraków módz, biedz

these verbs have no thematic vowel in the infinitive before its desinence, so the final consonant of their stem fuses with the infinitive ending into -c. Since their stems in inflected forms ends in a voiced consonant (mogę, biegła), hence some tried to spell the -c with the corresponding voiced affricate digraph <dz> (making use of the so-called morphological rule), even though it seems to me it was -kti rather than -gti already in Common Slavic.

Warsaw zjadszy Kraków zjadłszy

interconsonantal ł has had a long-standing tendency to become mute in Polish, and this was reflected in the spelling of the anterior adverbial participle suffix -łszy after a consonant in Warsaw and thereabouts. Nowadays it's spelt <zjadłszy>, yet hardly anyone uses the participle in actual colloquaial speech anymore and when they do, spelling pronunciations appear as a rule.

Warsaw gieografia, kielner Kraków geografia, kelner

the /kE gE/ clusters are foreign to Polish (except when resulting from the decay of nasal vowels, I mean, ę), so many people used to turn them in /k_jE g_jE/ in speech and regionally in writing; nowadays, most Latinate loans seem to have <ke ge> in writing and /kE gE/ in speech, yet you can sometimes hear e.g. inteligencja [intEli"g_jEntsja] but it's already nonstandard and looked at with suspicion as Poland's pretty linguofascist (not as much as France, perhaps)

Warsaw dobrym synem, dobrymi synami, dobrym dzieckiem, wielkimi oknami Kraków dobrym synem, dobrymi synami, dobrem dzieckiem, wielkiemi oknami

In the declension of adjectives, Old Polish had:

-im/ym in the instrumental singular masculine and neuter
-em in the locative singular masculine & neuter
-imi/ymi in the instrumental plural

Subsequently, e had a tendency to be raised to /i/ or /1/ in this positions and the locative and instrumental endigs merged, leaving a mess in the orthography. Grammarians of the XIX century attempted to solve this perceived problem in a perfectly artificial manner, restricting e to neuters (dziecko, okno) and i/y to masculines (syn). This spelling caught on in certain regions and even made it to the pronunciation of some placenames (e.g. Zakopane - name of a town near the Tatra mountains - has the half-artificial Zakopanem as it's prescriptively correct instrumental and locative)

Sorry for the sloppy spelling and formatting in this post, it was knocked up in haste

Aren't some non-Semitic languages written in the Arabic script a bit inconsistent with regard to the spelling of vowels? Does anybody know about Persian and Pashto?

[jmcd]

If it's multiple orthographies you're after, for Réunion Creole there is no standard orthography. There are multiple orthographies that people have come up with as well some people that think you should write it the same as French and the more ad hoc and inconsistent orthographies people will use in texts or emails for example. The word for "to manage, to be able to", /gej̃/ for example is written gagn' (thus identically spelt to /gaj̃/, the word for "to get, to earn") in a Francised orthography or ginÿ or guign or gaingne in some of the others. The orthography used correlates to some extent with politics: conservatives use French spelling whereas communists use phonemic spellings generally.

Although I think Serafín does have a point that orthography for most languages does not appear to have been standardised throughout most of history.

[Ser]

If romanizations count, it should probably be mentioned that it is two thousand fucking twelve and there still isn't a goddamn standard for transliterating Arabic.

(There are probably regional differences in what people actually use, but I don't know them.)

What regional differences, pretty much every author writing on Arabic uses their own idiosyncratic romanization. As a student of Arabic you get used to learning a new system with almost every new resource or article you come across.

I thought variability would be pretty common in romanizations though, there's nowhere near any single standard romanization for Cantonese or Lao either...

[Gulliver]

If it's multiple orthographies you're after, for Réunion Creole there is no standard orthography. There are multiple orthographies that people have come up with as well some people that think you should write it the same as French and the more ad hoc and inconsistent orthographies people will use in texts or emails for example. The word for "to manage, to be able to", /gej̃/ for example is written gagn' (thus identically spelt to /gaj̃/, the word for "to get, to earn") in a Francised orthography or ginÿ or guign or gaingne in some of the others. The orthography used correlates to some extent with politics: conservatives use French spelling whereas communists use phonemic spellings generally.

Although I think Serafín does have a point that orthography for most languages does not appear to have been standardised throughout most of history.

Thanks! It never occurred to me to look at creoles. In fact, the French-vs-phonemic example is probably what I'm looking for, as it's for a sociolinguistics paper.

Thanks peeps.

[Nortaneous]

If romanizations count, it should probably be mentioned that it is two thousand fucking twelve and there still isn't a goddamn standard for transliterating Arabic.

(There are probably regional differences in what people actually use, but I don't know them.)

What regional differences, pretty much every author writing on Arabic uses their own idiosyncratic romanization. As a student of Arabic you get used to learning a new system with almost every new resource or article you come across.

Regional differences with regard to the romanizations used by people writing in romanized Arabic on Twitter or whatever.

I thought variability would be pretty common in romanizations though, there's nowhere near any single standard romanization for Cantonese or Lao either...

Or Thai. There's an ISO standard that's fucking terrible and pulls shit like <s̛̄> and <ḳ̄h>, there's a standard supported by the Thai government that's fucking terrible and drops a massive amount of detail and doesn't mark tone, and I don't even want to know what else there is out there because it's probably even worse.

[finlay]

I thought variability would be pretty common in romanizations though, there's nowhere near any single standard romanization for Cantonese or Lao either...

Or Thai. There's an ISO standard that's fucking terrible and pulls shit like <s̛̄> and <ḳ̄h>, there's a standard supported by the Thai government that's fucking terrible and drops a massive amount of detail and doesn't mark tone, and I don't even want to know what else there is out there because it's probably even worse.

I know... I think if I ever learn Thai I'll just use the IPA. The ISO standard, IIRC, also forces you to put letters in exactly the same order as the Thai letters, which sometimes have vowel letters coming before the consonant they affect. That's rather annoying. I get the impression that everyone else just uses something ad-hoc... or learns the Thai script.

[Ser]

If romanizations count, it should probably be mentioned that it is two thousand fucking twelve and there still isn't a goddamn standard for transliterating Arabic.

(There are probably regional differences in what people actually use, but I don't know them.)

What regional differences, pretty much every author writing on Arabic uses their own idiosyncratic romanization. As a student of Arabic you get used to learning a new system with almost every new resource or article you come across.

Regional differences with regard to the romanizations used by people writing in romanized Arabic on Twitter or whatever.

Oh, I was having in mind romanizations used by academics only. The situation is so bad though that including popular romanization wouldn't make it any worse.

[Gulliver]

I have a further question - in languages which do have inconsistent, or competing, orthographies, how acceptable is it to switch between them mid-text? (akin to code-switching, I guess). Either consciously (to show u r down wiv da kidz or otherwise identify with a social group or political position, or just using whatever spelling comes to mind first?

[jmcd]

As far as Réunion Creole goes, just using whatever spelling comes to mind first is common but most things that are published, whether lyric notes or comic books or whatever, are more consistent. Using a mix of orthographies identifies you less easily with a particular group than using any particular one.

Consciously switching completely from one orthography to another, on the other hand, I've never seen.