Orthography

Orthography

Orthography refers to the letters that make up words. Reading from traditional orthography can be confusing.

While some words are regular words, which can be easily sounded out, like the word ‘hat’, others are more difficult. The word ‘was’ is not spelled like it sounds; ‘woz’.

Using the RMSE 1 orthography means that more words are regular words.

• Sounds ‘th’, ‘ch’, ‘sh’, ‘wh’, ‘qu’, ‘er’, ‘oo’ and ‘ing’ are represented by joined letters.
• Macrons (lines over vowels) distinguish long vowels from short vowels.
• The appearance of ‘b’ and ‘d’, ‘n’ and ‘h’, ‘f’ and ‘t’, and ‘j’ and ‘i’ are changed to minimise confusion caused by their visual similarity.
• At the beginning of RMSE 1, all sounds except ‘I’ appear as lowercase letters.

Letters are referred to as sounds in RMSE 1.