Character writing is laborious to learn and imposes a burden on the memory. Alternatives to it, in addition to alphabetic writing, include scripts that employ separate symbols for the syllable sequences of consonants and vowels in a language, with graphic devices to indicate consonants not followed by a vowel. The Devanagari script, in which classical Sanskrit and modern Hindi are written, is of this type, and the Mycenaean writing system, a form of Greek writing in use in the 2nd millennium bce and quite independent of the later Greek alphabet, was syllabic in structure. Japanese employs a mixed system, broadly representing the roots of words by Chinese characters (kanji) and the inflectional endings by syllable signs (kana). These syllable signs are an illustration of the way in which a syllabic script can develop from a character script: certain Chinese characters were selected for their sound values alone and, reduced in size and complexity, have been standardized as signs of a particular consonant and vowel sequence or of a single vowel sound.
The Greek alphabet came from the Phoenician script, a syllabic-type writing system that indicated the consonant sounds. By a stroke of genius, a Greek community decided to employ certain consonantal signs to which no consonant sound corresponded in Greek as independent vowel signs, thus producing an alphabet, a set of letters standing for consonants and vowels. The Greek alphabet spread over the ancient Greek world, undergoing minor changes. From a Western version sprang the Latin (Roman) alphabet. Also derived from the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet was devised in the 9th century ce by a Greek missionary, St. Cyril, for writing the Slavic languages. Spelling
Alphabetic writing is not and cannot be an exact representation of the sequence of sounds or even of the sequence of distinctive sounds in the spoken forms of words and sentences. Consonant and vowel mean different things when applied to letters and to sounds, though there is, of course, much overlap. The y at the beginning of yet stands for a consonant sound; at the end of jetty it stands for a vowel sound. In thick and thin the sequence th represents a single sound, not a t sound followed by an h sound. In kite the e represents no sound directly but distinguishes the vowel between k and t from the vowel in kit. These disharmonies arise from a number of causes. Economy in the use of letters is one factor. In addition, spoken forms are always changing over the centuries, whereas writing, particularly since the invention of printing, is very conservative. At one time the e at the end of words such as kite did stand for a vowel sound. This sound was lost between the 14th and 16th century, a time when other changes in the pronunciation of such words also occurred. The notorious ough spellings in English, standing for different sounds and sound sequences in rough, cough, dough, plough, ought, and other such words, have arisen from historical changes that have driven spelling and pronunciation farther apart.
This, of course, does not mean that spelling reforms are out of the question. Spelling reform has been talked of in relation to English for many centuries without much effect, but in some countries—for example, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands—official action has prescribed certain reforms to be made, and these have then been taught in school and have gradually found their way into printed works. The sheer volume of printed matter preserved for use and consultation in the modern world adds much weight against the convenience otherwise accruing from reforms designed to correct the historically produced disharmonies between spelling and pronunciation. Nevertheless, Noah Webster successfully introduced some changes into English in the late 18th century, and active movements supporting spelling reform in the language do exist.
Moreover, it is not always most useful for spellings to represent exactly the sound sequences in a word and nothing else; this is the task for which phoneticians have devised transcriptions. As far as the sounds themselves are concerned, the plural signs of cats, dogs, and horses are different: the final sound of cats is like the initial sound of sink, that of dogs like the initial sound of zinc, and the plural of horse is indicated by a sound sequence rather like that in is. But they are all indicated in writing by one and the same letter and always have been, because only one grammatical distinction, that of singular as against plural, is involved, and at this point in the language the actual differences in the sounds, important elsewhere, are irrelevant.
Letters, insofar as they stand for sounds, stand for consonants and vowels. But other sound features are involved in languages. In English words the location of the stress is important, and the words import as a noun and import as a verb are distinguished by this alone. All spoken languages make use of sequences of rises and falls in pitch, called intonation. These phenomena are unrepresented in orthography except for certain punctuation marks such as ? and ! and sometimes by italicization and underlining.
This is not a weakness in orthography. Writing is normally intended to be read and when necessary read aloud by people who already know the language and are therefore able to supply from their own competence the required detail. For specific purposes such as foreign-language teaching, as well as for the specific study of pronunciation in phonetics and phonology, various forms of transcription have been devised to indicate unambiguously by written signs the precise form of the spoken utterance, without regard to other considerations. Written versus spoken languages
For these reasons one should distinguish the grammar of a written language (e.g., written English) from the grammar of the corresponding spoken language (spoken English). The two grammars will be very similar, and they will overlap in most places, but the description of spoken English will have to take into account the grammatical uses of features such as intonation, largely unrepresented in writing, and a great deal of colloquial construction and spontaneous discourse processing; by contrast, the description of written English must deal adequately with the greater average length of sentences and some different syntactic constructions and word forms characterizing certain written styles but almost unknown in ordinary speech (e.g., whom as the objective form of who).
In studying ancient (dead) languages one is, of course, limited to studying the grammar of their written forms and styles, as their written records alone survive. Such is the case with Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit (Latin lives as a spoken language in very restricted situations, such as the official language of some religious communities, but this is not the same sort of Latin as that studied in classical Latin literature; Sanskrit survives also as a spoken language in similarly restricted situations in a few places in India). Scholars may be able to reconstruct something of the pronunciation of a dead language from historical inferences and from descriptions of its pronunciation by authors writing when the language was still spoken. They know a good deal about the pronunciation of Sanskrit, in particular, because ancient Indian scholars left a collection of extremely detailed and systematic literature on its pronunciation. But this does not alter the fact that when one teaches and learns dead languages today, largely for their literary value and because of the place of the communities formerly speaking them in our own cultural history, one is teaching and learning the grammar of their written forms. Indeed, despite what is known about the actual pronunciation of Greek and Latin, Europeans on the whole pronounce what they read in terms of the pronunciation patterns of their own languages.