Episode 468 - Saturday, September 29, 1979

Spelling is the combination of alphabetic letters to form a written word. It is a linguistic process of correct writing with the necessary letters and diacritics present in a comprehensible, usually standardized order. While a part of a language's orthography, not all languages have purely phonemic alphabets. Standardized spelling is a prescriptive element. Spellings originated as transcriptions of the sounds of spoken language according to the alphabetic principle. They remain largely reflective of the sounds, although fully phonemic spelling is an ideal that most languages' orthographies only approximate, some more closely than others. This is true for various reasons, including that pronunciation changes over time in all languages, yet spellings as visual norms may resist change. In addition, words from other languages may be adopted without being adapted to the spelling system, and different meanings of a word or homophones may be deliberately spelled in different ways to differentiate them visually.

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