Such shortcomings are not uncommon. The Greek alphabet was defective during its early history. Ancient Greek had distinctive 展开

Stenography systems are normally defective writing systems, leaving away redundant information for the sake of writing speed. Pitman shorthand, for instance, can be written … 展开

• Phonemic orthography – Orthography in which there is an exact one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes and the phonemes of the language 展开

Languages with a long literary history have a tendency to freeze spelling at an early stage, leaving subsequent pronunciation shifts unrecorded. Such is the case with English, French, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai, among others. By contrast, some writing systems have been … 展开

Defectiveness is a cline: the Semitic abjads do not indicate all vowels, but there are also alphabets which mark vowels but not tone (e.g. many African languages), or vowel quality but not vowel length (e.g. Latin). Even if English orthography were regularized, the English … 展开