The English

Writing
System

Chapter Six
The origin of writing…..
Writing first emerged from early people’s efforts to
record their experiences and to leave messages for
others.

The writings of early people were on walls of caves and

were marks carved in stone.
The writing systems
(orthographies)…
Evolved over time

An orthography is a code that consists of a set of

graphemes (written symbols that stand for a word,
syllable, or speech sound of a language) .

Types of orthographies:
• Logographic, chinese, syllabic, and alphabetic.
The most wide spread type of
writing is alphabetic…
This derives from ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman
languages.

The English language has many-to-many correspondence

between sounds and letters.

Other languages such as Finnish and Spanish have one-to-

one correspondence between letters and sounds.
Characteristics (changes) in
the English Language:
 Sound Changes: The pronunciations of sounds and words have
changed over the centuries, but their spellings have not
always changed accordingly.

 Borrowed Word Changes: Many invasions and occupations of

the British Isles as well as British exploration and
colonization around the world have made English the
borrowingest” language in the world. Numerous words from
other languages have been added to English without changing
their spellings.
Characteristics continuted…
Etymological Changes: An example of this type of change
come from the influence of classical studies during the
Renaissance. The writers wanted to give classical
languages a rebirth, so they resurrected some Latin
spellings.
A way to approach teaching
the English Language System
 Learning about the complex orthography of English not only
provides a fascinating history lesson, but it also suggests the
importance of learning about the relationship between words
and meaning, rather then a simply writing single words in
isolation.

 The most important thing to remember about spelling is that

it is a graphic representations of writing. And writing is for
constructing and communicating meaning.