orthography

Stop writing dog noises as just “bark” or “woof”—use a new and complete dog alphabet to give them their proper due! Linguists love this one weird tip that will expand the linguistics job market!

May 4, 2020

Beasts, Language

alphabet, arf, dog alphabet, dog bark alphabet, grrrr, musical staff, orthography, phonetic writing, phonetics, pitch, staff, tone, woof

Background: Written languages have generally been optimized for the most meaningful elements of speech, so sometimes strange workarounds are required to capture certain subtleties: e.g. capital letters for YELLING, alternating capitalization for “thE spEaKer is VEry StUpid,” ellipses for a stilted-last-gasps sort of speech (“tell… them… the… killer… was…”), or the HTML-inspired “/s” for “please…