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: Taking words from other social

societies. 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: The origin of words. 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.