Alphabetic principle

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The alphabetic principle is the foundation of alphabetic languages, such as Spanish or Greek. The alphabetic principle is that, in alphabetic writing systems, each symbol (letter) represents a sound, or that each grapheme represents a phoneme. Therefore, in Spanish, the letter u represents the sound /u/. The alphabetic principle does not underlie a syllabary like Japanese hiragana or a symbolic language like Chinese.

English is based on the alphabetic principle, but the acquisition of sounds and spellings from a variety of languages has made the alphabetic principle seem less reliable. For example, the sound /i/ is represented by nine relatively common graphemes (listed here in approximate order of frequency):

e as in meter
ee as in meet
ea as in meat
e_e as in athlete
y as in silly
ie as in believe
ei as in receive
ey as in turkey.
i as in piano.

Other examples of English's famously complex alphabet abound, as in the following poem, often reprinted and anonymously written:

I take it you already know,

Of tough and bough and cough and dough.

Others may stumble, but not you,

On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps.

Beware of heard, a dreadful word,

That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead - it's said like bed, not bead,

For goodness' sake, don't call it 'deed'!

Watch out for meat and great and threat,

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,

Nor both in bother, broth in brother.

And here is not a match for there,

Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there's dose and rose and lose -

Just look them up - and goose and choose.

And cork and work and card and ward,

And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go and thwart and cart -

Come, come, I've hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Why man alive!

I'd mastered it when I was five.

Examples like these are held up as evidence that the alphabetic principle does not really work in English. Others argue that while there are, no doubt, some non-alphabetic elements to the language, the principle is very much at work in English. It is not like Chinese, where word is represented by a single symbol that must be memorized in its own right. The argument about the value of the alphabetic principle is very closely connected with the argument about the value of teaching phonics to children when they are learning to read.