Abstract
This study attempts to identify aspects of the orthography of Hadiyyisa (one of the Highland East Cushitic languages) that need to be improved and to suggest possible solutions to this. Accordingly, a short Hadiyyisa paragraph was dictated to and was written by randomly selected elementary, high school and first-year university students. The results showed that the students had a problem of distinguishing phonological quantity, that is, between simplex and geminate consonants as well as between short and long vowels. Consequently, representing geminates and long vowels as simple segments occurred frequently. Some aspects of orthographic inconvenience which require adjustments were encountered and solutions were suggested from the perspectives of regularity and economy. Yet another constraint was suggested in relation to the transferability of incompatible knowledge of Hadiyyisa to English. The performance of female students, especially at high school and university levels, was found to be lower than that of the male students and the study suggests that this needs to be further investigated.
Highlights
This study attempts to identify aspects of the orthography of Hadiyyisa that need to be improved and to suggest possible solutions to this
This paper portrays the salient features of the Hadiyyisa orthography and discusses aspects that seem to require improvements
It is by no means intended to be critical of the users of the orthography, but rather to draw the attention of those concerned towards tuning up the orthography for better writing and reading
Summary
The assumption is that the performance of female students, which is better than that of male students at the elementary level, though with a small margin, gradually decreases as they proceed to high school and university levels since, domestic chores as well as other family and social responsibilities increase. The three most error-prone orthographic features at the elementary level were (from the most to the least prone): missing or distorting words, hypogemination, that is, failure to geminate consonants and hypo-lengthening, that is, failure to lengthen vowels. At the high school level the most error-prone orthographic features were: hypo-lengthening, hypo-gemination and vowel omission or substitution. Those of the university level were: hypogemination as well as hyper-gemination and hypo-lengthening. The percentage of each error type at each level is relative to the percentage of the total number of errors
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