Clarifying orthography: Orthographic transparency as compressibility
Abstract
Orthographic transparency -- how directly spelling is related to sound -- lacks a unified, script-agnostic metric. Using ideas from algorithmic information theory, we quantify orthographic transparency in terms of the mutual compressibility between orthographic and phonological strings. Our measure provides a principled way to combine two factors that decrease orthographic transparency, capturing both irregular spellings and rule complexity in one quantity. We estimate our transparency measure using prequential code-lengths derived from neural sequence models. Evaluating 22 languages across a broad range of script types (alphabetic, abjad, abugida, syllabic, logographic) confirms common intuitions about relative transparency of scripts. Mutual compressibility offers a simple, principled, and general yardstick for orthographic transparency.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.13657,
title = {Clarifying orthography: Orthographic transparency as compressibility},
author = {Charles J. Torres and Richard Futrell},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13657},
year = {2025}
}