Introduction: speech and writing

The relationship between the spoken and the written word is of two basic kinds; the written symbol may represent a concept directly, or it may represent the word which names the mental concept in an individual language. In the former case the symbol is called an ideograph, familiar examples of which are Arabic numerals; the numeral represents the same concept to speakers of different languages, but not the same word. The other type of relationship, in which the written form represents the spoken, is also of two kinds; one is phonemic, where each element or grapheme in the written form is intended to represent a sound, or phoneme, in the spoken (and occasionally, in Old English, an allophone). Illustrations of this relationship are common in modern English, e.g. sit, pan, lend. The second type is wholly or partially logographic (representing the word as a whole) where there may be only a partial ‘fit’ between phoneme and grapheme; the reader is expected to recognise the word as a whole even though the set of graphemes does not unequivocally indicate a specific set of phonemes. Many examples of logographs occur in Modern English, e.g. scene/seen, peal/peel, rain/reign, vale/veil. These pairs are known as homophones, words which sound alike but have different meanings and spellings. Homographs are two or more words with identical spelling but different pronunciations and meanings, e.g. wind ‘turn round’ and wind ‘movement of air’. Homonyms are sets of words with similar sounds and spellings, but different meanings, e.g. tender ‘part of a train’, tender ‘gentle’, tender ‘sore’, tender ‘offer’.