What, When, Where, How, Who?
Spelling
Introduction, Important Definitions and Related Concepts:
Spelling is the writing of a word or words with all necessary letters and diacritics present in an accepted standard order. It is one of the elements of orthography and a prescriptive element of language. Most spellings attempt to approximate a transcribing of the sounds of the language into alphabetic letters; however, completely phonetic spellings are often the exception, due to drifts in pronunciations over time and irregular spellings adopted through common usage.[1] Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols (known as a writing system). It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and the recording of language via a non-textual medium such as magnetic tape audio. Writing began as a consequence of the burgeoning needs of accounting. Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration outgrew the power of memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form (Robinson, 2003, p. 36). A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetical value. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses, and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together form a compound. A word combined with another word or part of a word form a portmanteau. A letter is an element in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme (sound) in the spoken form of the language. Written signs in earlier writings are best called syllabograms (which denote a syllable) or logograms (which denote a word or phrase). A diacritic or diacritical mark is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. The term derives from Greek διακριτικός (diakritikos, "distinguishing"). "Diacritic" is both adjective and noun, whereas "diacritical" is only an adjective. Many diacritical marks are often called accents; e.g. the grave and acute accents are, but the cedilla is not. A diacritical mark can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position. Its main usage is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also be used to modify the pronunciation of a whole word or syllable, like the tone marks of tonal languages, to distinguish between homographs, to make abbreviations, such as the titlo in old Slavic texts, or to change the meaning of a letter, such as denoting numerals in numeral systems like early Greek numerals. A letter which has been modified by a diacritic may be treated as a new, individual letter, or simply as a letter-diacritic combination, in orthography and collation. This varies from language to language, and in some cases from symbol to symbol within a single language. The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.) Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós ("correct") and γράφειν gráphein ("to write"). Orthography is distinct from typography. Orthography describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used, and the rules about how to write these symbols. Depending on the nature of the writing system, the rules may include punctuation, spelling and capitalization. While "orthography" colloquially is often used synonymously with spelling, spelling is only part of orthography. Phonetics (from the Greek φωνή (phonê) "sound" or "voice") is the study of the physical sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones), and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception. Phonetics was studied as early as 2,500 years ago in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification. In communication, media (Singular: Medium) are the storage and transmission tools used to store and deliver information or data. It is often referred to as synonymous with mass media or news media, but may refer to a single medium used to communicate any data for any purpose.[1][2][3] System (from Latin systēma, in turn from Greek σύστημα systēma) is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole. The concept of an 'integrated whole' can also be stated in terms of a system embodying a set of relationships which are differentiated from relationships of the set to other elements, and from relationships between an element of the set and elements not a part of the relational regime. There are natural and man-made (designed) systems. Man-made systems normally have a certain purpose, set of objectives. They are “designed to work as a coherent entity”. Natural systems may not have an apparent objective but they are sustainable, efficient and resilient. There are many kinds of systems. A system is a fundamental concept of systems theory, which views the world as a complex system of interconnected parts. We determine a system by choosing the relevant interactions we want to consider plus choosing the system boundary —– or, equivalently, providing membership criteria to determine which entities are part of the system, and which entities are outside of the system and are therefore part of the environment of the system. We then make simplified representations (models) of the system in order to understand it and to predict or impact its future behavior. An open system usually interacts with some entities in their environment. A closed system is isolated from its environment.
A subsystem is a set of elements, which is a system itself, and a part of a larger system. An illustration is a visualization such as a drawing, painting, photograph or other work of art that stresses subject more than form. The aim of an illustration is to elucidate or decorate textual information (such as a story, poem or newspaper article) by providing a visual representation. A cave is a natural underground void large enough for a human to enter. Some people suggest that the term 'cave' should only apply to cavities that have some part that does not receive daylight; however, in popular usage, the term includes smaller spaces like sea caves, rock shelters, and grottos. Speleology is the science of exploration and study of all aspects of caves. Exploring a cave for recreation or science may be called "caving", "potholing", or occasionally (only in Canada and the United States), "spelunking". Drawing is a visual art which makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, chalk, pastels, markers, stylus, or various metals like silverpoint. An artist who practices or works in drawing may be referred to as a draftsman or draughtsman. A small amount of material is released onto the two dimensional medium which leaves a visible mark—the process is similar to that of painting. The most common support for drawing is paper, although other materials such as cardboard, plastic, leather, canvas and board, may be used. Temporary drawings may be made on a blackboard or whiteboard, or indeed almost anything. The medium has also become popular as a means of public expression via graffiti art, because of the easy availability of permanent markers. Painting is the practice of applying color to a surface (support) such as, e.g. paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer or concrete. However, when used in an artistic sense, the term "painting" means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting is used as a mode of representing, documenting and expressing all the varied intents and subjects that are as numerous as there are practitioners of the craft. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion or be political in nature. A large portion of the history of painting is dominated by spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to biblical scenes rendered on the interior walls and ceiling of The Sistine Chapel to depictions of the human body itself as a spiritual subject. A magnet is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. A low-tech means to detect a magnetic field is to scatter iron filings and observe their pattern, as in the accompanying figure. A "hard" or "permanent" magnet is one that stays magnetized, such as a magnet used to hold notes on a refrigerator door. Permanent magnets occur naturally in some rocks, particularly lodestone, but are now more commonly manufactured. A "soft" or "impermanent" magnet is one that loses its memory of previous magnetizations. "Soft" magnetic materials are often used in electromagnets to enhance (often hundreds or thousands of times) the magnetic field of a wire that carries an electrical current and is wrapped around the magnet; the field of the "soft" magnet increases with the current. Two measures of a material's magnetic properties are its magnetic moment and its magnetization. A material without a permanent magnetic moment can, in the presence of magnetic fields, be attracted (paramagnetic), or repelled (diamagnetic). Liquid oxygen is paramagnetic; graphite is diamagnetic. Paramagnets tend to intensify the magnetic field in their vicinity, whereas diamagnets tend to weaken it. "Soft" magnets, which are strongly attracted to magnetic fields, can be thought of as strongly paramagnetic; superconductors, which are strongly repelled by magnetic fields, can be thought of as strongly diamagnetic. Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording generally consisting of a thin magnetizable coating on a long and narrow strip of plastic. Nearly all recording tape is of this type, whether used for recording audio or video or for computer data storage. It was originally developed in Germany, based on the concept of magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and playback audio and video using magnetic tape are generally called tape recorders and video tape recorders respectively. A device that stores computer data on magnetic tape can be called a tape drive, a tape unit, or a streamer. Magnetic tape revolutionized the broadcast and recording industries. In an age when all radio (and later television) was live, it allowed programming to be prerecorded. In a time when gramophone records were recorded in one take, it allowed recordings to be created in multiple stages and easily mixed and edited with a minimal loss in quality between generations. It is also one of the key enabling technologies in the development of modern computers. Magnetic tape allowed massive amounts of data to be stored in computers for long periods of time and rapidly accessed when needed. Today, many other technologies exist that can perform the functions of magnetic tape. In many cases these technologies are replacing tape. Despite this, innovation in the technology continues and tape is still widely used. Sound is vibration transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas; particularly, sound means those vibrations composed of frequencies capable of being detected by ears.[1] A language is a dynamic set of visual, auditory, or tactile symbols of communication and the elements used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon. Language is considered to be an exclusively human mode of communication; although animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language. Linguistic strings can be made up of phenomena like words, phrases, and sentences, and each seems to have a different kind of meaning. Individual words all by themselves, such as the word "bachelor," have one kind of meaning, because they only seem to refer to some abstract concept. Phrases, such as "the brightest star in the sky", seem to be different from individual words, because they are complex symbols arranged into some order. There is also the meaning of whole sentences, such as "Barry is a bachelor", which is both a complex whole, and seems to express a statement that might be true or false. In linguistics the fields most closely associated with meaning are semantics and pragmatics. Semantics deals most directly with what words or phrases mean, and pragmatics deals with how the environment changes the meanings of words. Syntax and morphology also have a profound effect on meaning. The syntax of a language allows a good deal of information to be conveyed even when the specific words used are not known to the listener, and a language's morphology can allow a listener to uncover the meaning of a word by examining the morphemes that make it up. In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest units of written language). The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.
- English example:
The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-", a
bound morpheme; "break", a free morpheme; and "-able", a
bound morpheme. "un-" is also a
prefix, "-able" is a
suffix. Both "un-" and "-able" are
affixes. The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s",
IPA: [s],
in cats ([kæts]),
but "-es",
[ɪz], in dishes ([dɪʃɪz]),
and even the voiced "-s",
[z], in dogs ([dɒgz]).
"-s" might even turn into "-ren" ([rɪn])
in children.
pho·net·ic
(f -n t  k)
adj.
Of or relating to phonetics.
Representing the sounds of speech with a
set of distinct symbols, each
designating a single sound:
phonetic
spelling. Of, relating to, or
being features of pronunciation that are
not phonemically distinctive in a
language, as aspiration of consonants or
vowel length in English.
[New Latin ph
 n ticus,
representing speech sounds, from
Greek phntikos,
vocal, from phntos,
to be spoken, from phnein,
to produce a sound, from phn,
sound, voice; see bh -2
in Indo-European roots.]
pho·net
i·cal
adj. pho·neti·cal·ly
adv. |
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. In vascular plants, the root is the organ of a plant body that typically lies below the surface of the soil. But, this is not always the case, since a root can also be aerial (that is, growing above the ground) or aerating (that is, growing up above the ground or especially above water). On the other hand, a stem normally occurring below ground is not exceptional either (see rhizome). So, it is better to define root as a part of a plant body that bears no leaves, and therefore also lacks nodes. There are also important internal structural differences between stems and roots. The two major functions of roots are absorption of water and inorganic nutrients and anchoring the plant body to the ground.
