Allography Totally Explained

Everything about Allograph totally explained

Allography, from the Greek for "other writing", has several meanings which all relate to how words and sounds are written down.

Allographs as authorship

An allograph may be the opposite of an autograph; that is, a person's words or name (signature) written by someone else.

Allographs in handwriting
:Allography is also the variation in how letters and other graphemes are written. The letter g, for example, has two common and many less common forms in different typefaces, and an enormous variety in people's handwriting. A positional example of allography is the so-called long s, a symbol which was once a widely-used non-final allograph of the lowercase letter s.

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   Complicated allographs may surprise or baffle language learners, just as those in place names can continue to confuse people who are unfamiliar with a particular location, even when they're native speakers of the language. One notorious allograph in the English language is ough, which may easily represent more than 10 different sounds, depending on which word it's used in.
   Allographs have found use in humor and puns; a famous example of allographic humour is that of spelling fish ghoti.
   The only reason that we accept all these varieties as representing the same sound or grapheme is that we've been taught to make these associations when learning to read. That is to say, their meaning and correspondence is assigned arbitrarily, by conventions adopted and observed by a particular language community. Many of these associations have to be unlearned if we study a second language whose writing system is based upon, or contains many elements similar to or shared by, our own alphabet or writing system. Very often, the letters one might be comfortable and familiar with are allographs of quite different sounds in the second language. For example, in written Spanish the grapheme will often represent the phoneme /b/, whereas in English this doesn't occur.

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