【英语学习】【WOTD】orthography 释义/词源/示例

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orthography podcast

orthography n. [or-THAH-gruh-fee]

正确拼字；拼字；正字法

Definition

1 a: the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage.
   a：按照标准用法正确拼写单词的技巧
   b: the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols
   b：用手写或者印刷符号表示语言的发音

2: a part of language study that deals with letters and spelling
   语言研究中涉及字母与拼写的部分

Did You Know?

“It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word!” That quote, ascribed to Andrew Jackson, might have been the motto of early English spelling. The concept of orthography (a term that derives from the Greek words orthos, meaning “right or true,” and graphein, meaning “to write”) was not something that really concerned people until the introduction of the printing press in England in the second half of the 15th century. From then on, English spelling became progressively more uniform and has remained fairly stable since the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (with the notable exception of certain spelling reforms, such as changing *musick * to music, that were championed by Noah Webster).

词源词根演化：orthos(“right or true”) + graphein(“to write”) —> orthography

“对单词只能想到一种拼写法绝对是一个愚蠢人。” 这句话，据说是Andrew Jackson说的，可能是早期英语拼写方式的座右铭了。拼写正字（orthography，起源于希腊单字orthos，意思是“正的，或真的”与graphein，意思是“书写”的组合）的概念一直不受人们关注，直到英国在15世纪后半叶引入了印刷出版技术。从那以后，英语拼写逐渐地走线统一，1755年Samuel Johnson出版了《英语语言字典》以后，英语拼写保持了相当的稳定性（有一些明显的例外来自于拼写改革，例如将musick改成music，主要是由Noah Webster倡导的）。

注：quote：引言，引语；motto：箴言，座右铭；printing press：印刷出版术；the first/second half of the century：某世纪的上/下半叶；progressively：前进地，渐渐地，逐渐地；champion：主导，倡导

Examples

• English orthography was not yet regularized in William Shakespeare’s time, so words often had many different spellings.
  在莎士比亚时代还没有规范的英语正字法，所以一个单词通常会有许多不同的拼写法。

• “He had to finish his thesis … before leaving for a research job in Australia, where he planned to study aboriginal languages. I asked him to assess our little experiment. ‘The grammar was easy,’ he said. ‘The orthography is a little difficult, and the verbs seemed chaotic.’”
  — Judith Thurman, The New Yorkers, 3 Sept. 2018
  他要先完成他的论文，才能去澳大利亚做研究项目。在那里，他计划研究当地的土著语言。我让他评估一下我们小实验。“语言比较简单，”他说，“正字拼写法比较困难，动词看起来非常混乱”。

  注：thesis：毕业论文，论文，论题；aboriginal：土著的，原产地的，（有时专指）澳大利亚土著居民的；chaotic：混乱的