Welsh is not as distant as Basque, Maltese, or Apache

[Benjamin Barrett]

That's a good catch. I looked in Crystal's "Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language," and orthography refers to the choice of alphabet.

I've sometimes wondered about the use of "spelling" for languages not using the Latin alphabet, though.

Wikipedia says about spelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling): "the writing of one or more words with letters and diacritics. In addition, the term often, but not always, means an accepted standard spelling or the process of naming the letters."

And orthography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography): The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system (script) to write the language.

These articles seem to show the terms are identical for those languages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_orthography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_spelling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_orthography separates spelling from punctuation. The reason seems to be because of the way terms are defined in Russian, but would you call comma use spelling? Probably punctuation is a part of orthography.

I think the use of letters in abugidas would also fall under spelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida).

How about when you need to select from more than one script? That seems to fit more into "species a standardized way of using a specific writing system." Japanese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system) has five scripts, including the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals, and Korean has three: hangul, Chinese characters and the Latin alphabet. Saying you use the hiragana "ha" to represent the postposition "wa" seems like a spelling issue, but whether you use hiragana, katakana or kanji to write words for animals seems more like an orthographic choice.

How about selecting Chinese characters? "That word is _spelled_ with the Chinese character for 'flower' not 'tree'" seems odd to me even though it's a matter of which writing symbol is used. Or the use of determinatives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determinatives) in Egyptian that had no pronunciation? Orthography?

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On Mar 19, 2012, at 11:35 PM, Kate wrote:

> 
> What is the difference between orthography and spelling? I thought they were the same thing.
> 
> --
> Kate Svoboda-Spanbock
> (sent from my iPhone; please excuse typos)
> 310-880-3091
> 
> On Mar 19, 2012, at 11:11 PM, W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Welsh is not as distant as Basque, Maltese, or Apache
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> RE: Interlingual distance.  Eric Nielsen wrote:  <<<How does one measures
>> how distant one language is from another?>>>
>> 
>> WB:  For us amateurs, a handy scale might be that of CV James, shown in a
>> box in Crystal?s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, p.371 in the first
>> 1987 edition (yeah, all my stuff is old). Basically, James has 5 criteria
>> for an informal estimate of the structural distance between E=English and
>> five European languages (F=French, G=German, I=Italian, R=Russian,
>> S=Spanish).  The diagram is like a five-pointed star, each arm segmented
>> from 1 (least distance from English) to 5 (greatest distance). The arms are
>> labeled Pronunciation, Grammar, Vocabulary, Orthography, and Spelling.
>> According to this scheme, Italian comes closest to English (of the five
>> Indo-European languages), with a score of 6: Pron=1 (easiest to pronounce)
>> + Gram=2(French, Spanish, Italian grammar would be about equally familiar
>> to Anglophones) + Vocab=1(same score as French & Spanish) + Orthog=1(same
>> as Fr, Sp, German) + Spel=1(same as Spanish). The other languages score for
>> interlingual distance as follows:  Spanish 7 (2+2+1+1+1), German 10
>> (2+3+2+1+2), French 12 (4+1+1+1+4+), Russian 15 (3+3+4+4+2). So, how would
>> I evaluate Welsh, based upon my one quarter of Medieval Welsh? Pron=1,
>> Gram=15, Vocab=14, Orthog=1, Spel=1; for a score of 32. I guess we have to
>> adjust the values upwards for less familiar languages; familiar to EGO in
>> the middle of the star, who happens to be ME.  Chinese (Mandarin): Pron=5
>> (1/segments, 10/tones) + Gram=50 + Vocab=100 + Orthog=1,000 + Spel=1,500 =
>> 2,651.
>> 
>> Keep in mind these are subjective, egocentric evaluations. If we had a
>> larger-scale survey, it might mean something. Plus the more language
>> criteria considered, the more meaningful (whatever that means).
>> 

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