Allography

Allography, from the Greek for "other writing", has several meanings which all relate to how words and sounds are written down.

Allographs as authorship

An allograph may be the opposite of an autograph; that is, a person's words or name (signature) written by someone else. [citation|title=A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory |author= Jeremy Hawthorn|year=2000|publisher=Oxford University Press|id=ISBN 0340761954]

Allographs in script

Allography is also the variation in how letters and other graphemes are written. The letter g, for example, has two common and many less common forms (glyphs) in different typefaces, and an enormous variety in people's handwriting. A positional example of allography is the so-called long s, a symbol which was once a widely-used non-final allograph of the lowercase letter s.

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Complicated allographs may surprise or baffle language learners, just as those in place names can continue to confuse people who are unfamiliar with a particular location, even when they are native speakers of the language. One notorious allograph in the English language is "ough", which may easily represent more than 10 different sounds, depending on which word it is used in.

Allographs have found use in humor and puns; a famous example of allographic humour is that of spelling "fish" ghoti.

The only reason that we accept all these varieties as representing the same sound or grapheme is that we have been taught to make these associations when learning to read. That is to say, their meaning and correspondence is assigned "arbitrarily", by conventions adopted and observed by a particular language community. Many of these associations have to be unlearned if we study a second language whose writing system is based upon, or contains many elements similar to or shared by, our own alphabet or writing system. Very often, the letters one might be comfortable and familiar with are allographs of quite different sounds in the second language. For example, in written Spanish the grapheme will often represent the phoneme /b/, whereas in English this does not occur.

ee also

*English words with uncommon properties which includes an examination of "ough"
*Glyph
*Phonics

References

External links

* [http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2004/04/all-about-allography.html Blog entry on the associations the shapes of letters may hold]
* [http://www.edsanders.com/phonics/ Forgotten Phonics rules from the early 1800s. Organized in printable sections to use as "cheat sheets" when figuring out how to pronounce words. Includes individual letter rules, diphthongs, tripthongs, silent letter rules and substitute letter rules.]