German Spelling and Pronunciation

choi

(1)
(a) "from around 1500 BC to 300 BC."  en.wikipedia.org for "Ancient Greek."
(b) Illiadis "traditionally attributed to Homer. Usually considered to have been written down circa the 8th century BC, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, along with the Odyssey, another epic poem attributed to Homer which tells of Odysseus's experiences after the events of the Iliad. * * * it is written in Homeric Greek"  en.wikipedia.org for "Illiad."
(c) "It [Homeric Greek] is a literary dialect of Ancient Greek"  en.wikipedia.org for "Homeric Greek."


(2) an overview/ a survey:

phonemic orthography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography
("is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language

Quote:

• "English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. However, because of their relatively recent modernizations compared to English, the Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Esperanto, Korean and Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.

• "Another terminology [other than 'phonemic orthography'] is that of deep and shallow orthographies, in which the depth of an orthography is the degree to which it diverges from being truly phonemic.

• "section 5 Comparison between languages: * * * Spanish (apart from h, x, b/v [where v is pronounced b: the same], and sometimes k, c, g, j, z) * * *

"Languages with a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include: * * *

"French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. The actual letter-to-phoneme correspondence, however, is often low and a sequence of sounds may have multiple ways of being spelt.

"Orthographies such as those of German * * * Portuguese, and modern Greek (written with the Greek alphabet), as well as Korean hangul [as opposed to hanja 漢字], are sometimes considered to be of intermediate depth

"Similarly to French, it is much easier to infer the pronunciation of a German word from its spelling than vice versa. For example, for [German] speakers who merge /eː/ and /ɛː/, the phoneme /eː/ may be spelt e, ee, eh, ä or äh.

"English orthography is highly non-phonemic. The irregularity of English spelling arises partly because the Great Vowel Shift [click to view section 2 Overall changes] occurred after the orthography was established; partly because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels; and partly because the regularisation of the spelling (moving away from the situation in which many different spellings were acceptable for the same word) happened arbitrarily over a period without any central plan. However even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and several of these rules are successful most of the time; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.

"The syllabary systems of Japanese (hiragana and katakana) are examples of almost perfectly shallow orthography [talking about kana system rather than kanji, which has Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, oftentimes several Chinese pronunciations (as Jaapnese scholars went todifferent Chinese capitals, which changed locations with time, and brought local pronunciations (of the same kanji back to Japan]

• "With time, pronunciations change and spellings become out of date, as has happened to English and French.

Note: grapheme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme
(two concepts; "The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived from Ancient Greek γράφω (gráphō) 'write', and the suffix -eme by analogy with phoneme")


(3) Standard German phonology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German_phonology
("While the spelling of German is officially standardised by an international organisation (the Council for German Orthography) the pronunciation has no official standard and relies on a de facto standard documented in reference works such as [dictioarues published by civilians] * * * This standardised pronunciation was invented, rather than coming from any particular German-speaking city. But the pronunciation that Germans usually consider to be closest to the standard is that of Hanover")

There is no need to read the rest of this Wiki page.

(4) German orthography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography
("German language * * * is largely phonemic. However, it shows many instances of spellings that are historic or [perhaps from loanwords] * * * The letter z represents the sound /t͡s/. The sound, a product of the High German consonant shift, has been written with z since Old High German in the 8th century")

(5) German orthography or alphabet contains letter c, which is used in loan words only (such as computer (borrowed from English), café (from French) ). See
Ingrid Bauer, 5 Peculiarities of the German Alphabet. ThoughtCo, updated April 12, 2018.
https://www.thoughtco.com/peculi ... an-alphabet-1444625

Quoting a section:

"[section heading] The K Reigns[:]

"Even though the letter C is in the German alphabet, by itself it plays only a minor role, since most German words that start with the letter C followed by a vowel, stem from foreign words. For example, der Caddie, die Camouflage, das Cello. It is only in these types of words where you'll find the soft c or hard c sound. Otherwise, the letter c is actually only popular in German consonant combinations, such as sch and ch, as stated in the preceding paragraph.

"You will find the German version of the hard 'c' sound in the letter K. Consequently, you will often see words that start with a hard c sound in English spelled with a K in German: Kanada, der Kaffee, die Konstruktion, der Konjunktiv, die Kamera, das Kalzium [noun neuter for calcium]

Note:
(a) Regarding the German and Jewish surname Bauer, see German-English dictionary:
* bauer (noun masculine): "farmer, psasant"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bauer
(b) hard and soft C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_C
(In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, including English, a distinction between hard and soft ⟨c⟩ occurs in which ⟨c⟩ represents two distinct phonemes. The sound of a hard ⟨c⟩ often precedes the non-front vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩ and ⟨u⟩, and is that of the voiceless velar stop, /k/ (as in car). While the sound of a soft ⟨c⟩, typically before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩, may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft ⟨c⟩ is /s/ (as in the first and final c's in "circumference"))
(c) English dictionary:
* calcium (n; "coined by British chemist Humphry Davy in 1808, from Latin [noun feminine] calx 'lime, limestone' because it occurs in limestone")
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/calcium