II. On Orthography
Orthography etymologically means the ‘right’ (orthos) ‘writing’ (graphein). Some of us may remember this as boring (at best) exercises in school, red corrections in our margins and points for knowing how someone somehow decided how to spell a certain word. In this unit, however, we are going in a different direction: Think of orthography as the education for professional spies! One of the qualities of a spy lies in his capacity to encipher or decipher cryptic messages. To fulfil this task, the spy must know the correspondences between single units in the encoded message and the single units of its content. In the case of alphabetic writing, certain phonetic units (sounds) correspond to certain graphic units (letters) and those units form together meaningful groups – words. Orthography, apart from its claim to authority, is a convention of how sounds and letters correspond to each other (and thus facilitates the tasks of of en- and decryption). This convention, however, may change over time.
Alphabetic writing systems like the descendants of the Phoenician alphabet (e. g., the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Greek, the Latin, the Cyrillic alphabet) have in common that they represent sounds with graphic signs. This has the advantage of representing the totality of words (meanings) with a relatively small number of distinct signs. The Phoenician and the Hebrew alphabet consist of only 22 different letters, the Greek alphabet of 24 (if one excludes some letters that dropped out like the digamma), and the Arabic alphabet of 28 letters in which every letter represents exactly one phoneme – unlike the Hebrew or Aramaic where in some cases two phonemes are attributed to one letter. One of the reasons for the widespread of the Phoenician alphabet and its descendants is that it can be quite easily modified to represent various languages regardless of their relationship. The Latin alphabet is used for different language families in Europe (for example Germanic or Finno-Ugric languages) and it is also adapted for the representation of non-European languages like Chinese or Arabic. Thus, the expression “Latin alphabet” indicates its origin as the set of letters being used to write texts in the Latin language, but this does not exclude its application (with modifications, if necessary) to other, not closely related languages.
Two aspects are important here: On the one side, of course, there is a cultural-historical entanglement between cultures and scripts. It is generally common to write English in Latin letters and not in Greek letters, for instance. On the other side, this is a convention, not a natural law. Scripts can be adapted for several languages and one language may be written in different scripts – think of the most prominent example, namely the transcription of various languages in academic works.
As a result, we have first to distinguish between a language and a script and second take changes in orthography into account: This is what we can observe when we deal with Arabic written in Hebrew letters: Texts display different orthographic manners corresponding to different stages in the history of ‘Judeo-Arabic’: ‘Early Judeo-Arabic’ (until the 10th century) and ‘Late Judeo-Arabic’ (since the 15th century) tend to a phonetic spelling that complies with the conventions of Hebrew and Aramaic. ‘Classical Judeo-Arabic’ (10th–15th century) in turn is geared to the orthographic conventions of Classical Arabic.